The epistemological claim, as articulated “Pragmatism and Humanism,” is that “in our cognitive as well as in our active lives we are creative. Participation, for James, was at once epistemological and ethical. 1 So rather than construction I want to talk about participation, which etymologically means “to take our share of.” The part in participation reminds us that we aren’t responsible for the whole thing, but we are responsible for our share. Lately the idea of truth as a “construction” has proven problematic, particularly in a moment when, in the United States, we find ourselves confronted with the specter of “alternative facts” and “fake news”-and so I wish to revisit this key Jamesian idea, but not through the familiar figure of construction-which seems inevitably to be taken up (as both Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers have pointed out) with a “merely” attached, as in “scientific laws are merely constructions,”-and which also lamentably suggests a fixed and static edifice, rather than a Jamesian flux. 1The premise of this essay is that one of the fundamental contributions of Jamesian thought to early-twentieth-century culture was the idea of truth as a participatory process involving a range of both human and nonhuman actors.
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