Dewey was a significant person in the history of pragmatic philosophy

One of the interesting facts about John Dewey is that Dewey was a significant person in the history of pragmatic philosophy. Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism. Dewey joined the newly established University of Chicago (1894-1904) in 1894 when he formed his belief in Rational Empiricism and became associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His tenure at the University of Chicago resulted in four pieces titled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which were published alongside collected works by his Chicago colleagues under the title Studies in Logical Theory (1904).

Dewey referred to his philosophy as instrumentalism rather than pragmatism at times, and he would have recognized the similarities between these two schools and the contemporary school known as consequentialism. In some phrases introducing a book he wrote later in life to help forestall a wandering kind of criticism of the work based on controversies due to differences in the schools that he sometimes invoked, he defined the criterion of validity common to these three schools, which lack agreed-upon definitions, with precise brevity. His concern for accurate definition led him to conduct an extensive investigation of sloppy word usage, which was published in 1949 in Knowing and the Known.