The Underground History of Pragmatism

I got this theory of American Philosophy.

I. Start with the Boston Brahmins — Emerson et al. Then add to that The Metaphysical Club. American Pragmatism starts with Charles Pierce and then gets picked up in a less rigorous form by William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism has other adherents after the first generation, notably GH Mead and W.E.B Du Bois among others. But Pragmatism is largely considered to have died out by 1950.

II. Years ago, I read this book called “Time in The Ditch”. Basically, the gist is that the McCarthy Years were especially hard on American Philosophy Departments. Pragmatism was always bound up in 1890- 1930s Progressivism and during the Red Scare, this was enough to call into question the loyalties of Academic Philosophers. Pragmatist philosophers were forced into retirement or blacklisted. American Philosophy departments turned towards Analytic Philosophy. Analytic was divorced from political and ethical concerns and focused almost entirely on logic. Non-Analytic Philosophy professors either retired or hid in Literature Departments. They stayed there until the mid 1960s when the first fumes of Structuralism began to waft from across the Atlantic. By the 1970s, Non-Analytic American Philosophy was found primarily in Comparative Literature Departments where it found new fuel with then emerging Critical Theory.

III. But what if a fair amount of American Pragmatists didn’t die, retire, or go into hiding like the Order of the Phoenix? What if the all bailed to Computer Science Departments? Well Connected Pragmatists willing to fight the Communists could have easily got jobs working on early era Computer Science problems. There’s very little distance from George Herbert Mead to Norbert Wiener. (A quick test of this is to check the participants at the Macy Conferences, post WWII.)

IV. What if the actual heir of American Pragmatism isn’t Philosophy, but Computer Science?