Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism

I've been reading a book of the above title, published in 1963, written by Edward H. Madden.

The title is a bit odd and is perhaps intended ironically. Madden's chief point seems to be that Chauncey Wright did not in fact set the "foundations of pragmatism," that he was more of a sounding board than an inspiration for those pragmatists with whom his name is generaly linked, Peirce and James, that his own views were positivistic and utilitarian.

Further, Madden seems to be of the view that on most of the points where those who are properly called pragmatists diverged from Wright, he was right and they were wrong.

Sample passage. After quoting from an essay by Wright that was itself a reply to a book by St. George Mivart, Mivart was an early critic, as Wright was an early defender, of Darwinism. In case you were wondering why I'm using an early-hominid skull to illustrate this blog entry, now you know.

As part of the Mivart review, Wright discussed the concept of an "accident" (as in an originally minute accidental genetic variation). Wright said that accidental in this context doesn't mean uncaused or indeterminate, only "that its causes are like particular phases of the weather, or like innumerable phenomena in the concrete course of nature generally, which are quite beyond the power of finite minds to anticipate or account for in detail, though none the less really determinate or due to regular causes."

Madden approves of this definition, and contrasts it with the pragmatists, James and Peirce, both of whom believed in a more metaphysical notion of accident, genuinely uncaused events.

Madden, for himself and Wright, says: "'Accident,' then is a characteristic not of events but of our knowledge of them; it means not that events are uncaused but that we do not know the cause. Wreight believed what Peirce later denied, that the universality of causality is a postulate of scientific inquiry...."