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Morton White’s philosophy of culture: Holistic pragmatism and interdisciplinary inquiry

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Abstract This paper explicates and defends Morton White’s holistic pragmatism, the view that descriptive and normative statements form a “seamless web” which must be tested as a “unified whole”. This position, originally formulated as a methodological and epistemic principle, can be extended into a more general philosophy of culture, as White himself has shown in his book, A Philosophy of Culture (2002). On the basis of holistic pragmatism, the paper also offers a pragmatist conception of metaphilosophy and defends the need for interdisciplinary inquiry.