p.25 We encounter a sign-using animal... denied intuitive, infallible access to reality... an agent exposed to the possibility of error at every turn and at every level. Yet, this fallible agent utterly dependent on misinterpretable signs is, in countless instances, a competent actor and, not infrequently, a deftly responsive participant in irreducibly complex situations. Indeed, the pragmatic face of the dialogical self is just this responsive participant in a human practice, especially at a critical juncture (i.e., a moment of crisis).

p.26 Thus, pragmaticism is, on my reading of this movement, not a unified doctrine or integrated set of more or less coherent doctrines. It is rather the sensibility of the historically self-conscious and methodologically self-critical participant in such practices as the sciences in which Peirce was trained and with which he identified throughout his life. Such a characterization of pragmaticism implies the primacy of practice. Human organisms are the ingenious inheritors (Joas, 1997; Colapietro, 1997) and, in some measure, the deliberate innovators of a vast array of more or less intersecting practices. They become agents in recognizable human form only in and through their participation in such practices.

p.26 What is central to pragmaticism is, first and foremost, a preoccupation with - and orientation toward - pragma. These pragma are our everyday affairs, the matters at hand (see, e.g., James, 2005; cf. [JLJ - cf. - Latin for confer, read "compare"] Heidegger, 1962). Given this preoccupation and orientation, the self is a participant in a set of practices, ranging from unacknowledged, even disavowed and unconscious ones to formally acknowledged and consciously undertaken ones.

p.28 Human experience is an ongoing dialogue between the human organism and a complex environment, more fully, between a sign-using, symbol-making organism and a shifting yet inescapable, expansive yet constraining, potentially threatening yet sustaining environment. As a participation in this process, the human organism is transformed into a reflexive agent (a being capable of an indefinite range of reflexive functions, such as self-criticism, self-encouragement, and self-admonishment).

p.28 The pragmatic turn is at once a semiotic turn and (in a sense requiring immediate qualification) a reflexive turn (cf. Smith, 1992). It is a turn toward signs in their myriad forms, not just toward linguistic signs.

p.29 pragmaticism arguably grants genuine efficacy to "internal conversation" (Wiley, 1994; Archer, 2003). The various sites of everyday experience... provide such agents with the bulk of the motives, opportunities, obstacles, and criteria in reference to which such agency takes shape, maintains and indeed modifies itself.