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The anti-skeptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey, have attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics. Literature, Culture, Theory 4$» • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • «$• • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • •*• • * • • * • • * • • * • •*• Rhetoric, sophistry, pragmatism Literature, Culture, Theory 4^» • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • • * • «J» • * • • * • • * • •*• • * • • * • • * • • * • •*• • * • • * • General editors R I C H A R D MACKSEY, The Johns Hopkins University and M I C H A E L SPRINKER, State University of New York at Stony Brook The Cambridge Literature, Culture, Theory series is dedicated to theoretical studies in the human sciences that have literature and culture as their object of enquiry. Acknowledging the contemporary expansion of cultural studies and the redefinitions of literature that this has entailed, the series includes not only original works of literary theory but also monographs and essay collections on topics and seminal figures from the long history of theoretical speculation on the arts and human communication generally. The concept of theory embraced in the series is broad, including not only the classical disciplines of poetics and rhetoric, but also those of aesthetics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and other cognate sciences that have inflected the systematic study of literature during the past half century. Selected series titles The subject of modernity ANTHONY J. CASCARDI Parody: ancient, modern, and post-modern MARGARET A. ROSE Critical conditions: postmodernity and the question of foundations HORACE L. FAIRLAMB Introduction to literary hermeneutics PETER SZONDI (translated from the German by Martha Woodmansee) Anti-mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock TOM COHEN Mikhail Bakhtin: between phenomenology and Marxism MICHAEL BERNARD-DONALS Theories of mimesis ARNE MELBERG Poetry, space, landscape: toward a new theory CHRIS FITTER The object of literature PIERRE MACHEREY (translated from the French by David Macey) Rhetoric, sophistry, pragmatism edited by STEVEN MAILLOUX Rhetoric, sophistry, pragmatism «£• •*• •*• •*• «J» •*• «J» «£• •*• •*• •*• •*• «£> •*• •*• «J* •*• •*• «J> «J* *J» •*• •*• •*• •*• •*• \&.,P-12. Pragmatism, rhetoric, and The American Scene pragmatism with a method for determining the "cash value'7 of ideas and associated truth with the merely expedient in our way of thinking, with what in some sense confirms and extends the rest of our beliefs? Such definitional procedures had often, of course, only succeeded in getting pragmatism dismissed as a crude, not to say utilitarian, form of intellectual calculus, but William clearly thought of it otherwise. In "What Pragmatism Means," the second lecture of his book Pragmatism, William actually sought to de-emphasize the positivist and empirical implications of the definition he had taken over from Charles Saunders Peirce by contend