Pragmatism and the Imagination

Ambrosio reads Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as inviting us to conduct experiments with our imaginations. On her account, the images that Peirce used to prompt his audience into such imaginative inquiry are tools that elicit imaginative activity. But since they are external and public, they also constrain that activity, resulting in shared habits that are subject to social criticism and thus to change. Ambrosio also considers John Dewey’s characterization of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal” in the imagination of different possible courses of action. While she notes that Dewey’s approach to the imagination adds a moral dimension missing from Peirce’s, she sees the two pragmatists as united in the view that experimental imaginative activities are empirical and social with important material components. She also engages with contemporary work on the imagination, suggesting that contributors to recent debates on that topic would benefit from studying Peirce and Dewey.