The “Flowing Stream” that Carries Pragmatism: James, Peirce, and Royce

Abstract

All the great classical pragmatists erected their variations of pragmatism upon distinct understandings of the continuity of experience. This paper explores how the conception of the “flowing stream” of experience is analyzed by James, Peirce, and Royce, so as to yield the distinctive flavor of their respective radical empiricism, pragmaticism, and constructive idealism.A first section examines how James’s phenomenological and psychological account of the “stream of thought” brought him to his conception of pure experience and thus to what Peirce called his extreme pragmatism. A second section attempts to show how Peirce’s own account of the “law of mind” served to clarify a key element of his pragmatic maxim, and how he subsequently developed a key conception that was to compete with James’s pure experience, that of the phaneron. A third section turns to Royce’s analysis of the passage from internal to external meaning, or his account of how purposes get fulfilled through the temporal stream of experience in order to reach a goal that is no longer in the stream, but without which there would be no stream at all. Special attention is given to Royce’s account of the “linkage of facts” and the significance he attaches to the relation of “betweenness.” A concluding section describes how the late Royce managed to move beyond his earlier analysis thanks to his study of Peirce’s semiotic theory of interpretation, which provided him with a far better notion of “mediation.” Peirce and Royce were kindred pragmaticist spirits, and both managed, in similar ways, to go beyond James.