Doubt
Abstract
While the history of American democracy owes much to classical liberalism, especially the idea that human beings are instilled with inalienable rights, in practice American democracy has always been a tug of war between balancing individual freedom with the collective good. Perhaps no group of American thinkers has wrestled with this dilemma more thoughtfully and thoroughly than the American pragmatists. This chapter offers a brief conceptual history of American pragmatism by tracing the importance of doubt as a critical practice for the development and maintenance of democratic institutions. Reviewing how key pragmatist thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Jane Addams, and John Dewey, among others, accounted for the function of doubt in their own philosophical writings, this chapter argues for the importance of not only acknowledging but also embracing doubt, or fallibilism, as a democratic virtue.
Publication Title
Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today
Recommended Citation
Pell, J., & Duffy, W. (2023). Doubt. Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today, 273-282. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198865698.003.0025
