Abstract

ABSTRACT A profound sense of biological explanations and the social nature of our species were appreciated by Chauncey Wright and American classical pragmatists. Inquiry was understood in the context of social cooperation. One achievement in the evolution of cephalic function is the development of social cooperative behaviors, the cornerstone of our cultural productivity. Classical pragmatism is linked to an expanding sense of human capability, tied to the deepening of human experience. While pragmatism is open-ended, the limits of human function put our advances into a perspective in which the evolution of function is just as apparent as the devolution of function.