Down the Rabbit Hole: Tracking the Humanizing Effect of John Dewey?s Pragmatism on Norbert Wiener

In 1914, Norbert Wiener wrote an article on relativism in The Journal of Philosophy. Throughout the text, the young post-doctoral student puts forth the notion that "no experience is self-sufficient, that no knowledge is absolutely certain, and that no knowledge is merely derived" [31, p.567]. All sorts of feedback, signals, and transactions - potentially controllable elements of communication - are at play. Relativism, Wiener posits, is "closely related" to pragmatism and, in fact, "only objects to pragmatism in so far as it seems to claim to have said the last word in philosophy: a relativistic pragmatism is quite possible" [31, pp. 568, 570].