This paper addresses two issues: the controversy over pragmatism in environmental philosophy, and the habitual exclusion of William James's work from serious examination. Addressing critiques of pragmatic naturalism from Max Horkheimer, Eugene Hargrove and Holmes Rolston, I argue that their criticisms misfire, primarily due to skewed perception derived from mis-interpretative projections of views to which pragmatism is not committed. I conclude that the critics' major concerns are largely groundless, but that greater emphasis on pragmatism's experiential aspect would clarify this.

In the first part of this paper, I delineate Peirce's general concept of diagrammatic reasoning from other usages of the term that focus either on diagrammatic systems as developed in logic and AI or on reasoning with mental models. The main function of Peirce's form of diagrammatic reasoning is to facilitate individual or social thinking processes in situations that are too complex to be coped with exclusively by internal cognitive means. I provide a diagrammatic definition of diagrammatic reasoning that emphasizes (...) the construction of, and experimentation with, external representations based on the rules and conventions of a chosen representation system. The second part starts with a summary of empirical research regarding cognitive effects of working with diagrams and a critique of approaches that use “mental models” to explain those effects. The main focus of this section is, however, to elaborate the idea that diagrammatic reasoning should be conceptualized as a case of “distributed cognition.” Using the mathematics lesson described by Plato in his Meno, I analyze those cognitive conditions of diagrammatic reasoning that are relevant in this case. (shrink)

Three indexes have been compiled: authors of main articles (including our special departments such as ‘Projects in progress’ and ‘Notes and discussions’); essay reviews; and book reviews. Co-author...

Book review of: Donald R. Morrison (Hg.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010.