Yep. See https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/download/2946/2607

Interesting read. It doesn't seem that Wittgenstein was ready to accept pragmatism on the whole of it and what I make out of the text. Do you know why? Might require some re-reading to jot the main reason as to why down.

Ciceronius stated that the pragmatists, for the most part, ignored what Wittgenstein had to say about meaning and use or utility. Why is that? — Posty McPostface

I think it's more accurate to say that the Classical Pragmatists were unaware of Wittgenstein. Peirce died in 1914, James in 1910. There would be no reason for them to know Wittgenstein; the Tractatus didn't come out until after the First World War. As for Dewey, I don't know whether he knew of Wittgenstein or his work. Wittgenstein isn't mentioned in any of the works of Dewey I've read, (I haven't read them all, of course) and I think their interests differed for the most part. From what I've read, Wittgenstein was fond of James' Varieties of Religious Experience. It's the "neo-pragmatists" who have championed the view that Wittgenstein was a kind of pragmatist, so far as I know.

LW also used James's Principles of Psychology as a text for his "classes".

LW also used James's Principles of Psychology as a text for his "classes". — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks, I didn't know that. it's supposed to be James' finest work, but I haven't read it (yet).

He liked to work through issues relating to psychology by taking passages from James as his text, and he and whoever had crammed themselves into his rooms would talk about them.

I think there's a quote somewhere to the effect that James was nearly right about a lot of things, and of course it's that little gap LW spends about 15 years in.

James was a good psychologist but a weak philosopher. The holes in his version of pragmatism were obvious. Peirce felt forced in the end to rebrand his pragmatism as pragmaticism because of that.

As Misak says:

The question of how Ramsey became an advocate of pragmatism is a fascinating piece of intellectual biography. He was as unhappy as Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein with William
James’s suggestion in his 1907 book Pragmatism:

Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is . . . true instrumentally. . . . Satisfactorily . . . means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. (James 1975, 34–35)2

It was Peirce’s more sophisticated pragmatism that influenced Ramsey

It doesn't seem that Wittgenstein was ready to accept pragmatism on the whole of it — Posty McPostface

It's a good question, and the article @apokrisis linked has some interesting quotes.

There are two questions here, really: why, as a matter of history, did LW not follow Ramsey into pragmatism? I doubt there's enough evidence to answer that question directly, so we'd have to look at LW's post-1929 work and see what in there is incompatible with Ramsey's take on pragmatism -- for which we also sadly have little to work with.

For instance, Ramsey describes inference as a habit. (Shades of Hume, I'd say.) I could see LW's extended discussion of rule-following as his response.

See https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/download/2946/2607 — apokrisis

Thanks, good paper.

To my understanding, pragmatism isn't generally considered to be a cohesive body of agreed upon thought that is acceptable to all of its adherents. And in identifying oneself to be a pragmatist there is always the paradoxical danger of misinterpreting pragmatism non-pragmatically in the spirit of metaphysical dogmatism.

To my understanding, pragmatism isn't generally considered to be a cohesive body of agreed upon thought that is acceptable to all of its adherents. — sime

I would say the historical situation is that Peirce formed an absolutely coherent view of pragmatism/semiotics. But then because of social forces, that never broke out the way it should have at the time. What came through into the public was the diluted Jamesian understanding of pragmatism (stripped of its semiotic backbone), or the Deweyian version (stripped of the metaphysical ambition).

The "true Peirce" didn't start to come through until the 1980s and 1990s. The start of his emergence was in theological circles. The radicalness of his metaphysics fitted with those wanting a more idealist philosophical basis. But then a proper interest in Peirce has developed - even if still off the mainstream map. Semiotics has become important in theoretical biology for instance. It is big in Spain and South America and Canada, and other places on the edge.

Peirce almost broke through in his own time, but philosophy was dominated by the UK, Germany and France. Harvard was some horrible provincial backwater of little account. And the Euro mood was also turning sharply to reductionism/AP. Peirce was offering a grand holistic logical scheme. The UK especially went with the shorn down logic of Frege. Peirce became just a background unacknowledged influence - a half-heard good idea that echoed but never fully grasped.

Again, it is not so surprising as he got into trouble with Harvard, went off into the solitary wilderness, never actually managed to publish a single coherent text to bring his mature vision together. He created no book to study. And it then took about 80 years for scholars to get through all the unpublished notes and papers to present a fair reading of a voluminous output.

So yes, Peirce's pragmatism/semiotics is utterly cohesive. And that totalising metaphysical view is itself considered a philosophical sin these days. No-one is meant to be able to make sense of it all in the way of an Aristotle or Hegel.

And then there are a host of non-philosophical reasons why Peirce's impact was only as a whisper in the ear of AP. And why Pragmatism is viewed shallowly in terms of the metaphysically and logically unambitious retellings by James and Dewey.

Hume also says that we are only told to believe it but our understanding of the different physical elements could change as our knowledge of philosophical stance changes from what we were initially taught.

Yes of course. The basic idea that our conceptions shape our impressions is ancient. The Greeks realised that we have to read the ship on the horizon as a regular-sized ship far away and not some tiny miniature. What we experience is constructed.

And then the epistemic issue becomes central with the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Once we turn to the practical business of truly knowing the world, then the semiotic relation - the scientific process of reasoning that involves abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation - emerges as something explicit. You get Hume and the rest starting to spell this out.

I just found this article really elucidating on the magnitude of Ramsey's pragmatic approach to philosophical issues having influenced Wittgenstein's transition and later period. Hope someone enjoys it:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle

An interesting article. I wonder how his thought would have developed if he had lived.

The following caught my eye as it related to the discussion of the Tractatus:

As Ramsey put it in a 1929 draft paper titled ‘Philosophy’, one method, ‘Ludwig’s’, is to:

construct a logic, and do all our philosophical analysis entirely unselfconsciously, thinking all the time of the facts and not about our thinking about them … — What is Truth? On Ramsey

This is the point of my saying that W.’s transcendental logic did not require a transcendental subject as Kant’s had.

The case for Ramsey and pragmatism is being somewhat overstated.

Well having read James, I think Wittgenstein was holding out for a limit to what could be explained, not saying one just could decide to not bother after working on it long enough.