Inquiry Road: A Pragmatic Model for Scientific Methods and the Temporalities of this Epistemology

Abstract: Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition , edited by Robert B. Talisse, Paniel Reyes Cárdenas, and Daniel Herbert, is the eighth title in the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy book series. According to the contributors, Hookway’s oeuvre has offered, first and foremost, a foundational interpretation and invaluable framework for the study of Charles Sanders Peirce, his philosophy of science, and pragmatist epistemology. For the explicit purposes of this review essay, therefore, I follow a single inquiry road through the intellectual landscape of this edited volume: To what extent, and in what ways, is a pragmatic model of scientific methods characterized by its temporalities ? And how is temporality necessary and significant for the methods of the sciences, their utility, and value? The road of inquiry , to apply the metaphor first introduced by Peirce and further utilized by Hookway, I model across five modes: affect , belief , community , doubt , and hope . The various chapters of this edited volume each more or less center around one of these modes. Ultimately, as I infer here, the inquiry of Peirce, as interpreted by Hook-way, and illustrated by Talisse, Cárdenas, Herbert, and the contributors to their volume, affords for the unifying modelling of our scientific methodologies based upon neither stages nor phases of linear time but modes of lived temporality. In this way, this model is therefore both pragmatically realist and radically psychological.