Larry Hickman

This article begins with a brief attempt to ascertain Nicholas Rescher's position with respect to the different versions of pragmatism mounted by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I then suggest that despite Rescher's self-described fealty to Peirce, his views are in some ways closer to Dewey's constructivism than he has acknowledged. I conclude, however, that his treatment of truth is quite different from Dewey's "warranted assertibility." Rescher's concept of truth appears to alternate somewhat inelegantly between truth-as-correspondence-to-fact and truth-as-trans-horizonal-limit

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism.

This essay argues that "the family" should be understood in functional terms:whatever functions as a family should have the legal status of a family. Theauthor's argument thus avoids two extreme positions. The first is the position ofthe hard-line "platonic" essentialists who, on grounds of nature, supernature, orcultural history, argue that a family unit must comprise heterosexual partners.The second is the position of the radical relativist, who argues that there are noessences whatsoever or that essences are purely arbitrary. Treating the family infunctionalist terms, the author argues, would have positive consequences thatwould strengthen the social fabric.