Pragmatismes et sociologies

Abstract

This article provides an account of a body of sociological studies recently published in France, which claims to use a pragmatist approach (that of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead), or to highlight the similarity between its analytical principles and those of sociology (the primacy of practice, the decisive nature of context, the importance of uncertainty, the temporality of action and the sociality of normativity). An examination of these publications also shows how certain notions belonging to pragmatism (habit, investigation, experimentation, valuation, democracy and truth) have now been assimilated by different sociological approaches in different ways.