Not unexpectedly, given that "pragmatism" is not a doctrine but a method (as Charles Sanders Peirce put it), the tradition of classical pragmatism is formidably diverse. Even the method—the pragmatic maxim—is differently interpreted by different pragmatists; and this diversity is compounded by the different doctrines and interests of the various pragmatists. But there is a pattern discernible within the diversity: a shift from Peirce's reformist, scientific philosophy, anchored by his realism about natural kinds and laws and about the objects of perception, through William James's more nominalist pragmatism, his insistence that "the trail of the human serpent is over everything" (1907, p. 37), through John Dewey's proposal that the concept of warranted assertibility replace the concept of truth, to the radicalism of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller's avowedly Protagorean relativization of truth to human interests.

Contemporary pragmatisms are no less diverse, but the spectrum has shifted to...