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Pratt, Native Pragmatism, chap. 1

PHIL 317, History of American philosophy, Fall 2026

Assigned: pp. 1–2, 12–16Open original PDF ↗

1 Background

More context for this work will come later in the semester. Here’s the gist of the entire thing: Pragmatism is in one of two ways one of the central movements of American philosophy. And suppose first of all we define pragmatism as the idea that the content of an idea is given by its meaning in practice. There are quite a few different ways that this idea gets interpreted, but the basic idea, again, is that the content of an idea is nothing but how that idea proves itself in its application. ## American philosophy: two or three models And when we talk about pragmatism as a ‘central movement’ in American philosophy, there are sort of two ways of receiving that idea.

  1. One is the literal and more restrictive association of pragmatism with a specific philosophical movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, which indeed we call pragmatism, centered around figures such as Peirce, James, and Dewey (all of whom we will read later in this course).
  2. Another is the more expansive fact that philosophy in the United States, both the sort we might associate with the broader current of European philosophy and thought of an indigenous-American origin, has tended toward the pragmatic and away from the abstract.

What Pratt argues in the book from which this first chapter is taken is that pragmatism in the narrower sense borrows, much as philosophy in the United States borrows, from indigenous American thought. Here I want to just get the gist of what’s going on in this chapter, focusing just on the few pages I’ve isolated.

2 Europe, philosophy, America

It probably won’t surprise you that historians long considered native Americans themselves non-contributors to philosophy in the United States. Pratt on p. 1 describes this fact along with the two models:

  • The American frontier story: American philosophy is just European philosophy in a new site, “the wilderness of North America”
  • The American genuis story: American philosophy is a “spontaneous” development of “European-descended thinkers in America”

Both stories of the origin of American philosophy involve a characteristic “mystery,” as Pratt puts it:

  • The frontier story faces the mysterious question of how that wilderness forced “‘new’ ways of understanding and acting in the world”
  • The genius story faces the ordinary “mystery of human genius”

Pratt argues that “distinctive aspects of American philosophy” find their origin “in Native American thought” (p. 2). ## Experience

That thesis is then reiterated on p. 12, with the especially significant idea mentioned here that he intends to chart the influence of Native American thought on American philosophy, not just through similarity but through contact.

Pratt notes McDermott’s claim, premised on his reading of Santayan, that an interest in experience guided much early American philosophy. See p. 13. But Pratt is skeptical about the idea that it was the experience of European descendants that shaped American philosophy. See p. 14. Instead, he claims, historians should regard experience as a concept happening at the frontier, the border of the interaction between European-descendants and indigenous Americans. See pp. 15–16.