NOTICE Many Major Revision Of This WebPage Are Now Completed. However, There Still Might Still Be A Few Other Errors And Omissions.

Henry Gurr ZMMQ Site Master 29Dec2015, 17Jan2020, 18Sept2022, 9Oct2022, 10-13une2023.

Robert Pirsig’s Works Are Seen As A) Fruition Of American Pragmatism. AND B) Not Only A Fruition, But Also A Pioneer Into The Territory Beyond.

… A Collection Of Various Author’s Viewpoints.

From Facegook.com/ZMMQuality: David Matos Makes a Good Summary Introduction. Sept 10, 2022
….Happy Birthday Charles Sanders Peirce! “The father of pragmatism”, scientist, philosopher, mathematician and esteemed logician, Peirce (pronounced “Purse”) was born September 10, 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a Harvard mathematician. The philosophical school of Pragmatism was established by Peirce along with his friend William James, and his student John Dewey. It was William James’ writing on pragmatism that Robert M. Pirsig found most compatible with his Metaphysics of Quality, daring to opine in Lila that the two’s works complemented each other. Besides prestige, the legacy of Pragmatism with Peirce and James at Harvard University is probably the reason Pirsig's collected papers went to the library there.
LEARN MORE…
Charles S. Peirce’s accomplishments and flawed, checkered life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
David Buchanan’s excellent essay “Pirsig as an American Pragmatist”:
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/02/22/pirsig-as-an-american-pragmatist/
…Recommended Book => "American Philosophy: A Love Story" by John Kaag on American Pragmatism, Charles Pierce, and William James. Thanks to ZMMQuality fan Delbert Blanton for the suggestion.

Excerpts From Wikipedia.
...Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.
...The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series (including "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), and especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878)) as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."
...Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt, and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics.
Under a Wikipedia photo => The "Chicago Club" including George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, James R Angell, and Addison Webster Moore. Pragmatism is sometimes called American pragmatism because so many of its proponents were and are Americans.
Remainder Of Wikipedia Is Here.

Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Also Has A Good Discussion Of American Pragmatism. Here is their first paragraph
...Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’.-
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/
NOTE: The sentence above beginning with … (relatedly …. is quite similar to Robert Pirsig saying => “I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.”
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John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education, A Book by David Granger.
...This 2016 book explores the writings of philosopher and educator, John Dewey, in order to develop an expansive vision of aesthetic education and everyday poetics of living. Robert Pirsig's best-selling book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” provides concrete exemplifications of this compelling yet unconventional vision.
...David A. Granger is Associate Professor of Education, Ella Cline Shear School of Education, The State University of New York at Genese, USA.
This book is available at various booksellers and by Amazon.com which has Paperback Fersion and Kindle eBook version.

Author. Nolan Pliny Jacobson’s Passages Concerning The Early Developments in America, That Lead up to American Pragmatism.
… "The focus of American thought has been centered in experience, in what individuals do and what is done to them as life responds freely to life, over and above any conception of how things ought to be. American philosophy is the first in the West to penetrate the outer shell of abstractions and emancipate the novel feelings and forms of awareness always emerging in the live creature. This effort to feel out the lines, folds, and rhythms of the basic medium in which the drama of life is enacted, this American revolution in what has been called lithe seat of intellectual authority, is already prominent in Emerson, becomes central with William James, wears an obvious Christian form in Royce, addresses the basic educational problems in John Dewey, expresses itself in the forms of logic and science in Peirce, acquires an elaborate metaphysical matrix in Whitehead, and in [Pg 119] the major living member of the group, Charles Hartshorne, mounts an all-sided attack upon the concept of "enlightened self-interest" which is paralleled only in the Buddhist past. Rejection of permanence, the acceptance of the transitoriness of life lanicca), the evacuation of any not-further-analyzable substances from both human experience and the world at large (anatta), and the disclosure of the individual's dynamic organic relatedness of which richness of life consists are all prominent perspectives shared by Buddhism and what Max Fisch calls "the Classical Age" of American thought.
… "How was it possible for this one culture-world in the West to arrive at methods and conclusions of central importance in Buddhism, curing human reason of its imperious European ways? What kind of cultural habits were set afoot on these shores, powerful enough to clear away the cosmological and ontological debris originally absorbed by everyone who came from the nations of the West: the persuasion that our concepts and values are rooted in divine revelation (Aquinas), in an eternal structure which mind discerns beyond all sense experience and change (Plato), in the Unconditioned which transcends time and space (Tillich), in Absolute Reason waiting in the wings of history to give structure to events and freedom to man (Hegel), in forms of understanding that yield universal and valid knowledge of the way reality must necessarily appear to minds such as ours (Kant), or in the structure that is in sense data independent of any influence of the human mind (Russell)? By what shift of the ground beneath their feet was it possible for a community of philosophers to renounce these" cozy conceptual superstructures," as a bhiilkhu from Sri Lanka has put it, and to create on this continent an openness, receptivity, and awareness to the world as it is presently becoming? How did it happen that the philosophers of what Max Fisch calls the "Classical Age" developed a sense of sharing a kind of relational power that is theirs, not by reason of what they all may know; but by reason of the interchange that links them to the rest of nature and to the cultural changes that were taking place? Philosophy grows out of human affairs. [Pg 120] What happened here to bring the major strands of American thought closer to the Buddhist orientation than to the cognition-based, definition-minded, concept-oriented, culture-encapsulated abstractions of European thought?
… "Youngest of the major nations, having only recently celebrated its Bicentennial, the United States was composed from the outset of people who could never quite succeed in fitting their feelings and dreams into the institutionalized patterns of the past. Fleeing religious persecution, material deprivation, avaricious landlords, forcible enslavement, debtors' prisons, war, and fighting here for their very lives against most of these dehumanizing forces, they did not narrowly win their cherished independence in order to give themselves into the control of another powerful social class or established religion. Their struggle for freedom from earthly and heavenly rulers, social classes, infallible truths, inflexible laws, and the tax collector continues it is not so distant in time that it must be remembered in a book.
[Wherein the remainder of this chapter answers these questions => “How did it happen?” ]
Click Here, And AFTER Page Comes Up, You May Read The Larger Context of The Above Excerpt. Please Scroll Down To => The focus of
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A Widely Read Literature, Barfield, Whitehead, & Charles Peirce Expert, Ken McClure, Agrees With Above, Concerning Early Development Of American Pragmatism. [From his email June 5, 2014. ]
... “As you know, I am very grateful for Charles Sanders Peirce. For that matter, I am grateful (like you, apparently) for the American Pragmatists. With them, it seems to me the philosophical center of gravity shifted from Europe to America. Or we might say that the Romantic spirit matured here, consenting to more directly come to grips with the world than it had previously. If this is so, we might see the Prags as the second wave of American Romanticism, following Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, et al. “
... ”Furthering my initial thesis, we have Whitehead voyaging to America around 1925 to assume his seat in philosophy at Harvard and begin his career as a philosopher proper. He was moved by the spirit of William James (whom he called "that adorable genius.") And it was at James's behest that the papers of the deceased Charles Peirce had been shipped to Harvard. Indeed, one of the trunks containing those papers was misplaced until eventually discovered by a janitor sweeping up in a basement. When someone brought one of Peirce's essays to Whitehead to read, the master commented: "It's clear that he is a process philosopher." That is, of course, the school of philosophy Whitehead is often said to have founded. “
... ”But Peirce lived most of the last half of his life as an outcast working in isolation. This is odd in someone who, though a "difficult" personality, seems to have had significant personal warmth. In the few years that he taught at Johns Hopkins, he inspired several conspicuously brilliant students who forever prized his influence. His letters to Letter Welby inspired her to spread his word, which may have spread to Brouwer and ripened into the philosophy of mathematical intuitionism. And his friendship with James was enduring and famously fruitful.”
... ”Arranging a course of lectures for Peirce at the end of their lives, James warned him against pushing logic too much into their forefront, since there were only a handful even amongst the Harvardians who had a prayer of understanding it. So Peirce gave a course on -- logic! Now if we stay with Peirce on his terms, there is tremendous meaning in the journey. What James must have been afraid of is something like the diagram on page 74 of Sheriff's book at the beginning of Chapter Five. But what remains for us is something Beethovenic, the work of a genius driven outside the walls of the city to make a music so beautiful that he who truly hears it can never know unhappiness again.
... '' ”You have to be mad to lament being bequeathed the gift of that music. But (as I hope the following passage may suggest), there was something immediately life-giving in Peirce that I think may have become even more so had he not been driven outside the walls of the city, if, say, he had been teaching in community or writing to others throughout the last half of his life. The way people often talk about semiotics makes it hard to see how signs might have anything to do with making the world better. That is where Peirce seems to me most life-giving.” .

Anyway, here's the passage that aspires to be suggestive:” '' [Following passage written by Ken McClure, with inserted “Quoted Passages” by Barfield, Shelley, & Frye.]
… “As Owen Barfield teaches, poetry involves using words to mean "more than they are as yet recognized to be worth." In this, it does not differ much -- it may not differ at all -- from creative science. Newton used the word "gravity" to mean more than it was worth before he used it in his then-new way. When Shelley wrote "my soul is an enchanted boat," he was using "soul" to mean more than it was worth before that moment. Leaving aside all the differences between the two uses, we can take that point. And the cash val-ue of both uses -- the way we can be sure that neither Newton nor Shelley were merely hallucinating -- is that, after they expressed themselves, the respective meanings of "gravity" and "soul" were commensurately enriched. We, their public, now recognize those words to be to worth more than they were before, to be worth roughly what they had been once been worth to no one but Newton or Shelley.” “
… “To the extent a poem succeeds, the words implicated in the poem take on more .. than they had before the poem entered our collective cognition. After we read the poem, some of its words take on different, richer meanings than they had before we experi-enced it; until we have read it, only the poet recognizes them to have this more-than-lexical meaning. Now, to say this is to oversimplify. The transaction is not this pre-cise. The poet doesn't have the exact worth calculated, the changed meaning is not identical to but commensurate with the meaning the poet had in mind, and so forth. Still, if the poem succeeds, the poet's words, or combination of words, come to be worth more and have more lexical meaning. If the poem fails, no such increase in worth, no such expansion of consciousness, ensues.”
… This creative reach of the mind extends to the world outside the poem or the scien-tific experience or mathematical equation. As Northrop Frye has observed:”
… "Nearly all of us has felt, at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this al-most never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and pru-dent and sensible people encourage us in this. That is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like 'if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.' Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more than the world we passively accept.” “ [Frye]
… ”And, seen this way, Frye's poet is not so very different from C.S. Peirce's mathe-matician:”
… "It is a familiar experience of every human being to wish for something beyond his present means, and to follow that wish by the question 'Should I wish for that thing just the same, if I had ample means to gratify it?' To answer that question, he searches his heart, and in so doing makes what I term an abstractive observation. He makes in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch of himself, considers what mod-ifications the hypothetical state of things would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is, observes what he has imagined, to see whether the same ar-dent desire is there to be discerned. By this process, which is at bottom very much like mathematical reasoning, we can reach conclusions as to what would be true of signs in all cases.” “ [Peirce]
...Hasta, Ken

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Later, same day, in response to Henry’s continuing questions in [square brackets], in his next email (~March 17 2014) Ken McClure further clarifies where the above italiced passages came from => ]
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“HENRY: THE QUOTED PASSAGE IS BARFIELD. HE IS ACTUALLY TAK-ING IT FROM SOMEBODY ELSE, BUT PART OF THE BEAUTY OF THE THEORY IS THAT IT IS REALLY COMMON SENSE: CREATED THOUGHT STARTS WHERE IT FINDS ITSELF, WITH THE MATERIALS AT HAND. THE REST OF THIS PASSAGE IS McCLURE GLOSSING BAR-FIELD; BUT IT'S REALLY NO MORE THAT REITERATING JUST WHAT BARFIELD SAYS. NOTE: It's interesting that emerging polylingual people speak of knowing that the language to be learned has been "internalized" when they begin to dream in that language. My sense is that, whether forever or since we have become "us," our language is distinguished by the depth to which it enters our uncon-scious. Somehow or other that means joined with "the will." Vygotsky says (something like): Thought is not begotten by thought, but by wishes and dreams and wants. White-head agrees that feeling is the vector that moves thought, but holds that it moves "be-neath" the level of language. It seems to me that, for us -- and I don't know when this began to happen -- language interpenetrates that vector.” ….
… “THERE MAY BE PROBLEM-PROBLEM SOLVING IMPULSE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE BRAIN. THIS GOES BEYOND THE AFFRONT IT MAY POSE TO THOSE WHO WOULD RATHER USE THE WORD "SOUL" THAN "BRAIN," ALTHOUGH AT ITS UTMOST THAT CAN BE AN IMPORTANT DISCUSSION. WHAT I'M LEADING TO IS WHITEHEAD'S POINT: THE SMALLEST UNIT OF BEING WE CAN IMAGINE MUST BE DEEMED A PROBLEM SOLVING UNIT IN VIRTUE OF ITS "BEING." THAT'S THE LARGER ISSUE RIGHT HERE.”
…. “Thus from the above: Barfield is correct ~"Words mean more than they say" AND even your words: " ... poetry involves using words to mean "more than they are as yet recognized to be worth." “
[ YES .... The "Human Problem Solving Brain”, that does this, automatically & sponta-neously! What say you? ]?
“AGAIN FOLLOWING WHITEHEAD, IN ADDITION TO SOLVING PROBLEM THERE IS AN IMPULSE TO "ADVANCE INTO NOVELTY." SOME QUAN-TUM OF CREATIVITY MUST BE GRANTED SIMPLY TO THAT IM-PULSE. IT IS NOT WHOLLY THE RESULT OF A PROBLEM THAT RE-QUIRES SOLUTION BUT AN IMPULSE TO CREATE ANEW TO ADVANCE INTO NOVELTY.”
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[ In a later email Ken McClure continues => ]
... “Dear Henry, However useful it may be as a tool, it can be perilous to "label" these schools. We might take the same group of American Pragmatists -- say, James, Peirce and Dewey -- and see them as more loosely related, not strictly by conceptual fidelity but, for instance, the way, oh, American southern writers may be seen as a group. This, I suggest, would account for a certain affinity that they actually do have and yet also do justice to the real creative differences abiding in the group. And my pitch here would be to include Whitehead in that group. From the time he took his post at Harvard around 1925, he was in the same American environment. He himself greatly valued the three thinkers in question, and in some sense he was a continuator of both James and Peirce; not so much in terms of strict conceptual fidelity, but the way Cormac McCarthy, the American writer, may be seen as a continuator of, say, Faulkner: deeply influenced by their spirit and moving towards the reach of their thought, as he creatively conceives it. ”

EMAIL THREAD => JOHN K. SHERIFF'S BOOK “THE FATE OF MEANING”. IT'S POSSIBLE TO LOOK AT THE DIVERGENT PATHS TAKEN BY WHITEHEAD AND RUSSELL, AFTER THEIR WORK TOGETHER, AS BEING DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE NATURE OF A SEMIOTICS “SIGN”.
Although Only Indirectly About Pragmatism, Ken McClure’s Passages Below. Gives Further Insight Into The Areas of Interest & Conclusions Of Above Mentioned Authors.

[From his email June 5, 2014. Kenneth Mcclure said => ]

Dear Henry,

“1. I'm sorry, I don't know the exact citation.” …[For Owen Barfield’s ~“Once you know you are creating your own reality, you realize you must be careful in the choices you make.”~ ]

“2. One of the points Sheriff makes is that there are basically two schools of "linguistic" semiotics, the popular one founded by Saussure and the neglected one founded by Peirce. The whole topic of semiotics gets even more confusing because it can quickly expand beyond the bounds of "linguistic" signs. If one were to say that the whole world is a text, then the field of semiotics might be as wide as the whole world. Another of Sheriff's points is that, in fact, the field has so expanded, and semiotics means not just Saussurean linguistics but "structuralism." Simply to hear that Marx and Freud are regarded as Proto-Structuralists is to get a sense that we are in danger of talking about everything here.”

“3. Whitehead can justifiably be considered a Peircean (so, by the way, I will submit, can Barfield). The key to simplify the discussion may be found in a pithy quote from Whitehead (which I also don't have precisely at my disposal, but I clearly remember first coming across in a footnote to Polanyi's Personal Knowledge): There is not a statement that perfectly states its meaning; not even one plus one is two.”

“The fact that signs cannot entirely tie meanings down can be taken as a curse or a blessing. Barfield, with our greatest poets, saw it as blessing. As someone else has said: There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.”

“Hail, Holy Light! Ken”

[From his email June 5, 2014. Henry Gurr replies => ]

Ken: Many thanks for suggesting John K Sheriff's book "The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature." . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. pp.xviii, 149. $13.15 pb.
…Now: Having studied Sheriff’s book closely, I see much illumination concerning, not only Linguistics & Semiotics (Theory of Signs), but also clear discussion of how “modernist objectivism” afflicted those early developers in the fields of Linguistics & Semiotics, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, and others .

In Sheriff’s book, I see many places, a discussion of the detrimental effect of separation of mind-body, & subject-object etc, and other concerns. These are the concerns we have learned about from Owen Barfield, Michael Polanyi, Robert Pirsig and perhaps William James.

This book has much about its title and it is quite pointed, as well as clearly stated re what was the assumed basis, of Ferdinand de Saussure type Structuralism, how WRONG it is and how your (Ken’s) favorite Charles Peirce position is FAR better!!

I see many constructive parallels with Barfield and ZMM!!! WOW! Especially the last ~ 3 Chapters of the book.

Sheriff, even gives approvingly one good quote from your (Ken’s) 2nd favorite author Whitehead !!!

Anyway, in reading this book for last week, I conclude there are quite a number of passages, I want to put on record and potentially is in my "New Book" and or in my "Chart of Author Comparisons".

For this reason I desire (fairly soon), a editable and searchable digital copy, of most of Sheriff's book:

Do you have any awareness of such??

I found one full text on internet, but seems in China &thus seems un-trust worthy

Hope you can send email, some good info, before I start to Scan and OCR to needed editable and searchable digital copy, of most of Sheriff's book.

Please let me know ASAP!!

[From his email June 6, 2014. Kenneth Mcclure said => ]

“Henry ''

“I'm sorry; don't know where the [Sheriff full text digital] file you need might be. But your response makes me happy. Notwithstanding our enthusiasm for it, I don't think Sheriff's book has made the kind of splash we would expect.”

“I do have a few more recommendations.”

“Walter Ong's book “Orality and Literacy” is really crucial. It might be considered a companion piece to Saving the Appearances, offering scholarship to support points that Barfield makes with unique clarity largely through poetic insight, and providing (as the title may suggest) a framework for the concept of evolution of consciousness. In tandem with this, F.M. Cornford's Before and After Socrates shows how crucial the individual spiritual agent's interpretation of sign may be to course of that evolution.”

“Walker Percy's essays on language (some of which are collected in The Message in the Bottle) are wonderful. Percy has learned from Barfield and is a major proponent of Peirce. "Symbol as Need" is a good essay to read to see if he might be helpful to your current project” .

“Werner Heisenberg's essay "The Debate between Plato and Democritus" is critical because of its contention that all physico-mathematical work in signs must be translated into the signs of natural language in order to have full-bodied meaning. I don't know where in Heisenberg's published work this one may repose; I have it in Ken Wilber's Quantum Questions.”

“Robert Bly's essay "What the Image Can Do" is almost an Owen Barfield workshop. It suggests how "sign" must be used as "image" or "symbol" for its full spiritual power to be realized. I'm not sure where to find that either. You're probably better at finding stuff than I.”

“All of these suggested selections are relatively short. That goes even for Ong's book, especially relative to its epochal significance.”

'' “Thank you, Henry. Keep going. Keep going” . Ken “

[From various of his emails Apr 22, 2014 thru Oct 6, 2014. Ken McClure offers suggestions of valuable books => ]

Dear Henry,

I don't know if you have read Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy or Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato. Havelock's thoughts on the role of the alphabet in the evolution of consciousness figures importantly in Ong's grand unified field theory of culture.

There is a lucid and insightful discussion of the centrality of the Cabala tradition to the western mind in Donald J. Wilcox's chapter on Neo-Platonism in In Search of God and Self.

Ken
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I don't know if i have mentioned William H. Cavlin to you. He's A Neurobiologist Given To Speculate On The Origin Of Consciousness, I suppose we would say a materialist, and someone who can't write two sentences without setting off innumerable Aha moments in the mind of any but the Most Obtunded Reader. I think he is right up Your Alley, and it is An Alley that you and I share. (Wherever that may be.).
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If The Evolution Of My Own Consciousness resumes, one of the questions i will be picking up concerns, in part, from Ken Wilber's Introduction To “Quantum Questions”. That book is important for reasons quite apart from Ken Wilber, in that it contains some wonderful writing by an assemblage of The Founding Fathers Of Quantum Physics. If you can find your way to it, we can discuss it when i shift back into An Evolutionary Mode.
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“Goodbye Decartes”, By Keith Devlin, for a lot of reasons but here, as we focus on what The Sign Means, to get a sense of How Logic Must Be "Embodied", to be Humanly (And Perhaps Humanely) Meaningful. Also for its own other merits but here for the perspective on the same thing see Oliver Sacks's “Seeing Voices”. It Would Also Be Good To Take A Glance At Whitehead And Russell's vastly different Approaches To Meaning in the wake of the failure of their “Principia Project” The Fruits Of Russell's Vintage Can Be Sampled In The Harvest Of The Logical Positivists. I Think Whitehead's short essay "Immortality" can be sampled to get a feel for his. And you should be especially appreciative of it since Michael Polanyi cites the following (a close paraphrase if not a quote) from it in Personal Knowledge: “There Is No Statement That Perfectly States Its Meaning -- Not Even One Plus One Is Two”. Finally, again for its sheer delight but also for a special insight into Chomsky's thought, see Jeremy Campbell's wonderful “Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language And Life”. If, in addition to what you already have on your plate, you will top it all off with Barfield's Essay "Thinking And Thought" (In “Romanticism Comes Of Age”), You will be ready to write your “Semiotical Opus” and i will come sit at your feet.

Although Only Indirectly About Pragmatism, This Quote From Owen Barfield (A Very Important 20th Century Thinker), Gives Insight Into How The Human Mind Develops New Ideas.
" ... In our critical thinking as physicists or philosophers, we imagine ourselves set over against an objective world consisting of particles, in which we do not participate at all. In contrast, the phenomenal, or familiar, world is said to be riddled with our subjectivity. In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena—all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside, in a continually changing way. ... " [Bold by HSG]

NOTE: Wilipedia Henry David Thoreau Article, does not mention pragmatism, but Thoreau surely was influenced by other early writers of the Early American Pragmatism tendency, saying => “Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).”

A Robert Pirsig Expert David M Buchanan, Helps Us Understand Prisig’s Works In Relation To American Pragmatism.
...Pirsig doesn't mind slapping a few philosophological labels on his own work. It has to be located somewhere on the philosophical landscape, after all. "The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy," Pirsig writes in Lila. "It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism." Even more specifically, he identifies his MOQ with the pragmatism and radical empiricism of William James.
…Charles Sanders Pierce, William and John Dewey were, more or less, the original founders of American pragmatism, although James had said that "pragmatism" was a new name for some very old ideas. The founders from this period, and the contemporary professional philosophers who follow them, are known as classical pragmatists but there is also a rival branch known as neo-Pragmatism. This latter school is roughly centered around Richard Rorty. There is a bit of a war going on between the two branches, which is pretty interesting if you're into that sort of thing.
Click Here For Remainder of David Buchanan Article.
[NOTE: I, Henry Gurr, have more Buchanan writing which will be added here asap. ]

'Pragmatism and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
A study of Robert Pirsig's Contribution To The Pragmatism of Peirce, James and Dewey.'
Excerpt From => B.A. dissertation, completed 1994, by Dean Summers
...Undoubtedly Pirsig's texts are unique in their synthesis of the forms of Fiction, Autobiography, Travelogue, Chautauqua, ‘how to’ manual and philosophy amongst others. However the agreement that they are unique seems also to serve to identify the texts as cultish and to thereby contain and remove Pirsig's philosophy from mainstream philosophical consideration. This is quite probably a mistake at the expense of contemporary philosophy. In this study we will try to show that Pirsig presents not only a coherent and tenable theory, but that he has made a significant contribution to American pragmatism. We will ignore the unique form of his work in order to focus on the relevance and importance that his concepts might have for the mainstream philosophical discourse. [Skip paragraphs]
...Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He (Pirsig) has been doing it right all along. (Pirsig, 1974, 381)
but this does not necessarily mean that he is not also offering a 'proper' philosophy; we might note that the American pragmatist Schiller referred to himself as a disciple of the arch Sophist Protagoras (Russell, 1946, 94). In a very general way we can recognise a basic connection between the Sophists emphasis on the quality rather than on the truth of a statement, and the pragmatists’ emphasis upon value and meaning rather than upon certainty and truth.
…To give Pirsig his fair trial then we will be analysing his philosophy in terms of the pragmatism of Peirce, James and Dewey. Regarding Pirsig we will be necessarily reductionist, considering only the essentially philosophical aspects of his texts and ignoring all other aspects. Regarding the founders of pragmatism, we will be necessarily selective - we will select from their rigorous and extensive arguments in order to support, clarify and achieve the fullest possible exposition of Pirsig's rather sketchier arguments. The crucial point of this is that Pirsig offers a significant development of pragmatism. If it were simply that he agrees with or is in line with the pragmatists, then Pirsig's philosophizing might be of little interest to us. The importance of his work is that his specific concept of Quality is an original and valuable development of American pragmatic philosophy.
...The concept of Quality seems to have been sought and touched upon but never fully realised by Peirce, James or Dewey. As the central concept in Pirsig's scheme it can also be seen to connect both broadly and deeply with the pragmatists ideas. Toward the end of LILA, Pirsig realises when reflecting on the ideas he has developed that they are connected to pragmatism. and to the pragmatism of James in particular. He claims firstly that the concept of Quality or Value (he uses the terms interchangeably throughout both texts) enables a unification of James' formerly distinct theories of pragmatism and radical empiricism (Pirsig.1991, 372). And secondly on the basis of the first claim, he states that

...These claims, which seem to involve only the central concepts of his and James' positions, are quite specific. We will address them in this study but our aim is also to make a wider comparison than Pirsig has done - wider in the sense that it extends to Peirce and Dewey too, and wider in the sense that we will consider the full extent of Pirsig's position, including the general motives and the criticisms of other philosophies which he shares with the founders of pragmatism. It is hoped that in doing so we might initiate a revised understanding of Pirsig's unique inquiries into values and morals, and that we might indicate further areas of Pirsig's philosophy which require necessary critical analysis.
Click Here For Remainder Of This Article.
...If you would like to contact Dean Summers directly about his paper, he can be reached at: dsummers@uclan.ac.uk

In Robert Pirsig’s Own Book “LILA,” We Have His Understanding How His ZMM Book Related to American Pragmatism.
...”A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his idea of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower of Aristotle. Psychology Today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone was right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the comparison with James interested him most because it looked like there might be something to it.”
...”It was also very good philosophological news. James is usually considered a very solid mainstream American philosopher, whereas Phaedrus' first book had often been described as a 'cult' book. He had a feeling the people who used that term WISHED it was a cult book and would go away like a cult book, perhaps because it was interfering with some philosophological cultism of their own. But if philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the MOQ is an offshoot of James' work, then that 'cult' charge was shattered. And this was good political news in a field where politics is a big factor."

An Another Possibility For How Robert Pirsig Relates To American Pragmatism.
[ From Henry Gurr email June 5, 2014 to David Granger]
... As another avenue of influence, for example, Pirsig says in ZMM he has
extensively read "Walden Pond" to his son Chris. Could Thoreau thus, also be a
another way for Pirsig to "pick up ideas from the early American Pragmatists, such as Emmrson and perhaps Whitman"? Could this be like, or add to, your statement =>

think, regardless of whether or not people have actually read him or not. … And I think as well that Emerson was really a part of Dewey's consciousness, though he didn't write on (or about) Emerson extensively. …. So that's another way that the strong parallels between "Pirsig" and Dewey might have developed.”
...Here I am reminded that Thoreau lived with, was a tutor to Emerson’s childre, and for many years was was dependent on Emerson. So yes, yet other avenues of influence to bpyj Dewey or Pirsig?
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