According to the cultural critic George Santayana, American pragmatism connects "the American experimental and inventive attitude" with older philosophical ideas, and also responds to the religious tradition in American thought by focusing on "human purposes. . . derived from their wants and needs" (Sidorsky, pp. xv-xvi). In the view of intellectual historian Morton White, Dewey's pragmatic philosophy "lays the foundation for a more effective structure for American social ideals" by providing a way to close the gap between scientific knowledge and other ways of knowing. For Dewey, "Knowledge was an interaction of organism with environment in which the agent actively intervened to predict future experience and to control it" (Sidorsky, pp. xxxv-xxxvi).

Dewey's pragamatic philosophy was, according to Sidorsky, "a monument to that period in American culture which made possible a confident, optimistic vision of the potential application of the methods of the sciences to the dominant traditions of philosophy and the major institutions of society" (p. lv).

Although Dewey's work fell "out of fashion" in the second half of the twentieth century, interest in Dewey and pragamatism has revived recently, particularly as expressed by the contemporary American philosopher Richard Rorty.

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