Is There Any Room for Immediate Experience? Looking for an Answer in Dewey (and Wittgenstein) via Peirce and James

The paper investigates the prospect of dealing with “immediate experience” from a pragmatist perspective. The issue at stake is the possibility of speaking in a deflationary yet tenable way about the direct character of our common experiences of the world, given that the human environment is profoundly characterized by linguistic, inferential and interpretative practices. The author explores John Dewey’s answers to the above-mentioned problem. These can be seen to reflect a sort of tension within classic pragmatism between the young Peirce's lesson about the semiotic and mediated structure of human cognition and James’s mature claim for immediate experience. Not least by means of a comparison with Wittgenstein’s approach, the thesis arising from the paper is that Dewey was able to solve the apparent divergence by considering experience in close connection with life and through a complementary understanding of cognition as a specific form of experience, as well as by emphasizing the role of the qualitative or aesthetic aspect of primary experience. Moreover, Dewey’s non-foundational and circular conception of the relationships between qualitative and reflective experience is identified as a decisive step.