What Pragmatism Means by Public Reason

Abstract

In this article I examine the main conceptions of public reason in contemporary political philosophy (Rawls, Habermas, critical theory) in order to set the frame for appreciating the novelty of the pragmatist understanding of public reason as based upon the notion of consequences and upon a theory of rationality as inquiry. The approach is inspired by Dewey but is free from any concern with history of philosophy. The aim is to propose a different understanding of the nature of public reason aimed at overcoming the limitations of the existing approaches. Public reason is presented as the proper basis for discussing contested issues in the broad frame of deep democracy.

Keywords: Public reason, pragmatism, epistemology of practice, John Dewey