Overview
Before Pragmatism Had a Name examines how William Blake's America: A Prophecy anticipates American anticipatory epistemology. The paper identifies six structural convergences between Blake's prophetic vision and pragmatist philosophy, arguing that Blake's visionary epistemology prefigures key concepts in American pragmatism (Peirce, Dewey, James) before the formal emergence of the pragmatist tradition.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The paper maps Orc's revolutionary fire to Peirce's irritation of doubt, and the Thirteen Angels' collective transformation to Mead's socially constituted self.
- It reads Blake's Four Zoas as a proto-cognitive architecture anticipating Active Inference's factorized generative model, with fragmentation as 'Newton's Sleep'.
- A sixth dimension links Fuller and Applewhite's Synergetics (tetrahedron replacing cube) to Blake's anti-Newtonian stance and Peirce's pragmatic maxim.
- The author argues the convergences are structural rather than analogical and formalizes them with Markov blankets, generative models, precision weighting and multi-agent belief alignment.
- Proposed implications span computational psychiatry, digital humanities, and AI alignment (Fourfold Vision as corrective to next-token prediction).
Methods
- Primary textual analysis of Blake's America a Prophecy (Erdman edition) — Each convergence dimension is grounded in verified quotations from America a Prophecy, using Erdman's edition as the source.
- Structural-correspondence method rather than causal or genealogical claims — The manuscript identifies shared topological features across Blake, Pragmatism and Active Inference without claiming historical influence.
- Synthesis of pragmatist scholarship from Peirce to Brandom — Six convergence dimensions are developed against an account of American Pragmatism informed by Menand, Misak and Bernstein.
- Active Inference formalization in a nine-row triadic synthesis atlas — Uses Parr, Pezzulo and Friston (2022) as technical reference to map nine Blake–Pragmatism–Active Inference correspondences (Table 6).
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