Pragmatism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition began in the United States around 1870.
[1] Charles Sanders Peirce, generally considered to be its founder, later described it in his
pragmatic maxim:
| “ |
Consider
the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your
conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the
object.[2] |
” |
Pragmatism rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality.
[3]
Instead, pragmatists consider thought an instrument or tool for
prediction, problem solving and action. Pragmatists contend that most
philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language,
concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of
their practical uses and successes.
The word "Pragmatism" as a piece of technical terminology in
philosophy refers to a specific set of associated philosophical views
originating in the late nineteenth-century. However, the phrase is often
confused with
"pragmatism" in the context of politics
(which refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on practical
considerations, rather than ideological notions) and with a non-
technical use of "pragmatism" in ordinary contexts referring to dealing
with matters in one's life realistically and in a way that is based on
practical rather than abstract considerations.
Origins
Charles Peirce (
like "purse"): the American
polymath who first identified pragmatism
Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the
United States in the 1870s. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his Pragmatic Maxim) is given credit for its development,
[4] along with later twentieth century contributors,
William James and
John Dewey.
[5] Its direction was determined by
The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
Chauncey Wright, as well as John Dewey and
George Herbert Mead.
The first use in print of the name
pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with
coining the term during the early 1870s.
[6] James regarded Peirce's 1877–8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series (including "
The Fixation of Belief", 1877 and especially "
How to Make Our Ideas Clear", 1878) as the foundation of pragmatism .
[7][8] Peirce in turn wrote in 1906
[9] that
Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying
Alexander Bain's
definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to
act." Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more
than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the
grandfather of pragmatism." John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also
deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it
was Wright who demanded a
phenomenalist and
fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."
[10]
Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or
hyperbolic doubt,
[11]
and said, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way,
"Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then,
your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the
object",
[2] which he later called the
pragmatic maxim.
It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the
conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects.
This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational
mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable
confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable to
the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the
employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his
concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual
foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist
empiricism, although he was a
mathematical logician and a
founder of statistics.
Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own
interpretation. While framing a conception's meaning in terms of
conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is
general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its
acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any
definite set of real consequences (or test results); a conception's
clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the
outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined
the new name
pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition",
[12]
saying that "all went happily" with James's and Schiller's variant uses
of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new
name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where
it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript he cited as causes his
differences with James and Schiller.
[13] and, in a 1908 publication,
[14] his differences with James as well as literary author
Giovanni Papini.
Peirce in any case regarded his views that truth is immutable and
infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he
remained allied with them on other issues.
[14]
Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after
W. V. O. Quine and
Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize
logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as
neopragmatism gained influence through
Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late twentieth century pragmatists along with
Hilary Putnam and
Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict
analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as
Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.
Inspiration for various pragmatists
[citation needed] included:
Core tenets
A few of the various but interrelated positions often characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:
- Epistemology (justification): a coherentist
theory of justification that rejects the claim that all knowledge and
justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential
knowledge or justified belief. Coherentists hold that justification is
solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which
are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundationalist theories of justification.
- Epistemology (truth): a deflationary or pragmatist
theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that
assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a
property called truth to such a statement while the latter is the
epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a
statement attribute the property of useful-to-believe to such a
statement.
- Metaphysics: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content.
- Philosophy of science: an instrumentalist and scientific anti-realist
view that a scientific concept or theory should be evaluated by how
effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how
accurately it describes objective reality.
- Philosophy of language: an anti-representationalist view that rejects analyzing the semantic meaning
of propositions, mental states, and statements in terms of a
correspondence or representational relationship and instead analyzes
semantic meaning in terms of notions like dispositions to action,
inferential relationships, and/or functional roles (e.g. behaviorism and inferentialism). Not to be confused with pragmatics, a sub-field of linguistics with no relation to philosophical pragmatism.
- Additionally, forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verificationism, and a Quinean naturalist metaphilosophy are all commonly elements of pragmatist philosophies. Many pragmatists are epistemological relativists
and see this to be an important facet of their pragmatism (e.g. Richard
Rorty), but this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such
relativism to be seriously misguided (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).
Anti-reification of concepts and theories
Dewey, in
The Quest For Certainty, criticized what he called
"the philosophical fallacy":- philosophers often take categories (such
as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize
that these are merely
nominal
concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This
causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "
ultimate Being" of
Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "
realm of value",
the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete
thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thinking, and so on.
[weasel words][not specific enough to verify]
David L. Hildebrand sums up the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the
specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike
to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of
extensive abstraction back onto experience." (Hildebrand 2003)
[not specific enough to verify]
Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism
From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it
more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They
argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present
human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held
that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired
by Kant or to
correspondence theories of knowledge and truth.
[citation needed] Pragmatists criticized the former for its
a priorism, and the latter because it takes
correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between
knower and
known.
In 1868,
[15] C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of
intuition
in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of
introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an
internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts.
Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least
since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition
in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always
be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call
introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the
mind—the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the
external world and not the other way around (De Waal 2005, pp. 7–10).
At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology
in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood
as a special science:
[16] what we
do think is too different from what we
should think; in his "
Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general.
[17]
This is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists,
who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism.
Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to
carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and
sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. W.V. Quine,
instrumental in bringing
naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay
Epistemology Naturalized
(Quine 1969), also criticized 'traditional' epistemology and its
"Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was
impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it
separates epistemology from scientific inquiry.
Hilary Putnam asserts that the combination of antiskepticism and fallibilism is a central feature of pragmatism.
Reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism
Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and
fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism.
[citation needed]
Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a
'God's-eye-view,' this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical
attitude, a radical
philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called
scientific skepticism). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope,
[18] that truth and the real are discoverable and
would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough,
[2] and (2) contrary to Descartes' famous and influential methodology in the
Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal
fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt.
[19]
Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and
inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared
to act.
[2]
It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of
fact (which Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in
some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally
self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of
belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to
modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist
insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the
older skeptical tradition.
Pragmatist theory of truth and epistemology
Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge:
Schopenhauer advocated a
biological idealism
as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from
what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate
spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any
sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges
this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry
is how organisms can get a grip on their environment.
Real and
true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not
realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what
Hilary Putnam would later call
metaphysical realism), but it is
realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with.
Many of James' best-turned phrases—
truth's cash value (James 1907, p. 200) and
the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking
(James 1907, p. 222)—were taken out of context and caricatured in
contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with
practical utility is true. William James wrote:
It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in
philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the
silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable
to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history.
Schiller says the truth is that which 'works.' Thereupon he is treated
as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey
says truth is what gives 'satisfaction'! He is treated as one who
believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be
pleasant. (James 1907, p. 90)
In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle. (See Dewey 1910 for a 'FAQ')
The role of belief in representing
reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality?
Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing,
(James 1907, p. 91). Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or
false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action? Is
it only in the struggle of
intelligent organisms
with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a
belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In Pragmatism
nothing practical or useful is held to be
necessarily true, nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my
cheating
spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not
useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with
the facts (and is therefore not true).
Pragmatism in other fields of philosophy
While pragmatism started out simply as a criterion of meaning, it
quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging
implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work
in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse
and there are no received views.
Philosophy of science
In the philosophy of science,
instrumentalism
is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments
and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and
theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often
define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in
explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that
truth doesn't matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the
question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in
science.
One of
C.I. Lewis' main arguments in
Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge
was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must
work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic
reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of
multiple
modal logics is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a 'conceptual pragmatist' because of this. (Lewis 1929)
Another development is the cooperation of
logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of
Charles W. Morris and
Rudolf Carnap. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the
pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement don't often refer to them.
W. V. Quine's paper "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism",
published 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of
twentieth-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an
attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One
is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and
contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of the meanings
of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and
synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of
(contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory
that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical
construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience.
Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms aren't a
priori truths but synthetic statements.
Logic
Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook,
Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an
ordinary language philosophy.
Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by
showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least
famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his
destructive book
Formal Logic. In this sequel,
Logic for Use, Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in
Formal Logic.
What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a
logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive
method.
Whereas F.C.S. Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic,
most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate
validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps,
considering the multitude of formal logics, one
set of tools among others. This is the view of C.I. Lewis. C.S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic.
Stephen Toulmin's
The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work).
Metaphysics
James and Dewey were
empirical
thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is the
ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were
dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because in the tradition dating
from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing
more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against
the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in
experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them
away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality.
Radical empiricism,
or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to
meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective
additions to a world of whizzing atoms.
The "Chicago Club" including Whitehead, Mead, and Dewey. Pragmatism is sometimes called American Pragmatism because so many of its proponents were and are Americans.
William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:
[A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for
granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open
relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind
you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to
do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with
them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to
which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled,
muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your
philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The
contradictions of real life are absent from it. [...] In point of fact
it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition
built upon it [...] It is no explanation of our concrete universe (James
1907, pp. 8–9)
F.C.S. Schiller's first book,
Riddles of the Sphinx,
was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement
taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground
between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are
comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and
tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that
mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our
world. These include freewill, consciousness, purpose, universals and
some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make
sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change,
physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle
ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool
that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does
help in explanation.
In the second half of the twentieth century,
Stephen Toulmin
argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only
arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no
point in asking what 'ultimate reality' consists of. More recently, a
similar idea has been suggested by the
postanalytical philosopher Daniel Dennett,
who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to
acknowledge both the 'syntactical' aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing
atoms) and its emergent or 'semantic' properties (i.e., meaning and
value).
[citation needed]
Radical Empiricism gives interesting answers to questions about the
limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value and
the workability of
reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the
relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into 'merely'
physical phenomena.
Philosophy of mind
Both
John Dewey in
Experience and Nature (1929) and half a century later
Richard Rorty in his monumental
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to
the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that
there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an
ontological category.
Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a
quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former
(Rorty among them) want to do away with the problem because they
believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a
meaningful empirical question.
Ethics
Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and
theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and
values. Both facts and values have cognitive content: knowledge is what
we should believe; values are hypotheses about what is good in action.
Pragmatist ethics is broadly
humanist
because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us
as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz.
the
Good Reasons approach.
The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who
have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as
Jerome Schneewind and
John Searle.
William James tried to show the meaningfulness of (some kinds of)
spirituality but, like other pragmatists, did not see religion as the
basis of meaning or morality.
William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay
The Will to Believe
has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality.
On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree
of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof
when making moral decisions.
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question
not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it
did exist. [...] A social organism of any sort whatever, large or
small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a
trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a
desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent
persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive
faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an
army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all
exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but
nothing is even attempted. (The Will to Believe James 1896)
Of the classical pragmatists,
John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. (Edel 1993) In his classic article
Three Independent Factors in Morals
(Dewey 1930), he tried to integrate three basic philosophical
perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held
that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral
questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot
always be easily solved. (Anderson, SEP)
Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between
means and ends
which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working
lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He
stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education
that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself. (Dewey
2004 [1910] ch. 7; Dewey 1997 [1938], p. 47)
Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the
emotivism of
Alfred Ayer.
Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental
discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as
feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead
to satisfactory results or what he termed
consummatory experience.
A further implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible
undertaking, since human beings are frequently unable to know what would
satisfy them.
During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of
bioethics led by the philosophers
John Lachs and his student
Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book "'The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering'" (see
designer baby) garnered praise from within classical
American philosophy
and criticism from bioethics for its development of a theory of
pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in
vogue in
medical ethics.
An anthology published by The MIT Press, "'Pragmatic Bioethics'"
included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah
Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own
theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs
himself developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics
independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.
A recent pragmatist contribution to
meta-ethics
is Todd Lekan's "Making Morality" (Lekan 2003). Lekan argues that
morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has
traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles.
Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice
more intelligent.
Aesthetics
John Dewey's
Art as Experience, based on the William James lectures he delivered at
Harvard,
was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday
experience. (Field, IEP) Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of
everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group
of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive
recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the
transcendental approach to
aesthetics in the wake of
Immanuel Kant who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation.
A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is
Joseph Margolis.
He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent
entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in
line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes
that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no
determinate interpretation can be given.
Philosophy of religion
Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in
A Common Faith and the latter in
The Varieties of Religious Experience.
It should be noted, from a general point of view, that for William James, something is true
only insofar
as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may
work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the
things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its
soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism
isn't antithetical to religion but it isn't an apologetic for faith
either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the
possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he
observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a
denial of the existence of transcendent realities. Quite the contrary,
he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such
realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in an individual's
life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on
intellecutal or common sensorial grounds.
Joseph Margolis, in
Historied Thought, Constructed World
(California, 1995), makes a distinction between "existence" and
"reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things
which adequately exhibit Peirce's
Secondness: things which offer
brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things
which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they
do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage,
might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a
way, but might not "exist".
Analytical, neoclassical, and neopragmatism
Neopragmatism
is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers, some of
them radically opposed to one another. The name neopragmatist signifies
that the thinkers in question incorporate important insights of, and yet
significantly diverge from, the classical pragmatists. This divergence
may occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are
loyal to the analytic tradition) or in conceptual formation (
C.I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey;
Richard Rorty dislikes Peirce). Important analytical neopragmatists include the aforementioned Lewis,
W. V. O. Quine,
Donald Davidson,
Hilary Putnam, and the early
Richard Rorty. Brazilian social thinker
Roberto Unger
advocates for a "radical pragmatism," one that 'de-naturalizes' society
and culture, and thus insists that we can "transform the character of
our relation to social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just
to change, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs
that comprise them."
[20] Stanley Fish, the later Rorty and
Jürgen Habermas are closer to
continental thought.
Neoclassical pragmatism denotes those thinkers who consider themselves inheritors of the project of the classical pragmatists.
Sidney Hook and
Susan Haack (known for the theory of
foundherentism)
are well-known examples. Many pragmatist ideas (especially those of
Peirce) find a natural expression in the decision-theoretic
reconstruction of epistemology pursued in the work of
Isaac Levi.
Nicholas Rescher
advocates his version of "methodical pragmatism" based on construing
pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its
evidentiation.
Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. It is probable, considering the advent of
postanalytic philosophy
and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, that more
philosophers will be influenced by pragmatist thought without
necessarily publicly committing themselves to that philosophical school.
Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine's, falls into this category, as does
Stephen Toulmin, who arrived at his philosophical position via
Wittgenstein,
whom he calls "a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind" (foreword for
Dewey 1929 in the 1988 edition, p. xiii). Another example is
Mark Johnson whose
embodied philosophy
(Lakoff and Johnson 1999) shares its psychologism, direct realism and
anti-cartesianism with pragmatism. Conceptual pragmatism is a theory of
knowledge originating with the work of the philosopher and logician
Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the 1929 book
Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge.
'French Pragmatism' is attended with theorists such as
Bruno Latour,
Michel Crozier,
Luc Boltanski, and
Laurent Thévenot. It is often seen as opposed to structural problems connected to the French
Critical Theory of
Pierre Bourdieu.
Legacy and contemporary relevance
In the twentieth century, the movements of
logical positivism and
ordinary language philosophy
have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism
provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us
of nonsense metaphysics, however, logical positivism doesn't stress
action as pragmatism does. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used
their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually,
pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to
construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale
rejection.
Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other
philosophy of language because of its
nominalist
character and because it takes the broader functioning of language in
an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations
between
language and
world.
Pragmatism has ties to
process philosophy. Much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers such as
Henri Bergson and
Alfred North Whitehead,
who aren't usually considered pragmatists because they differ so much
on other points. (Douglas Browning et al. 1998; Rescher, SEP)
Behaviorism and
functionalism
in psychology and sociology also have ties to pragmatism, which is not
surprising considering that James and Dewey were both scholars of
psychology and that
Mead became a sociologist.
Utilitarianism has some significant parallels to Pragmatism and
John Stuart Mill espoused similar values.
Pragmatism emphasizes the connection between thought and action. Not surprisingly, applied fields like
public administration,
[21] political science,
[22] leadership studies,
[23] international relations,
[24] conflict resolution,
[25] and research
methodology[26]
have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism in their field. Often this
connection is made using Dewey and Addams's expansive notion of
democracy.
Influence of pragmatism in social sciences
Symbolic interactionism,
a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived
from pragmatism in the early twentieth century, especially the work of
George Herbert Mead and
Charles Cooley, as well as that of
Peirce and
William James.
[27]
Increasing attention is being given to pragmatist epistemology in
other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with
divisive debates over the status of social scientific knowledge.
[5][28]
Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach which is both pluralist and practical.
[29]
Influence of pragmatism in public administration
The classical pragmatism of
John Dewey,
William James, and
Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of
Public Administration. Scholars claim classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of public administration.
[30][31]
At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for
making programs "work" in a pluralistic, problems-oriented environment.
Public administrators are also responsible for the day-to-day work with
citizens. Dewey's
participatory democracy
can be applied in this environment. Dewey and James' notion of theory
as a tool, helps administrators craft theories to resolve policy and
administrative problems. Further, the birth of American
public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists.
Which pragmatism (classical pragmatism or neo-pragmatism) makes the most sense in
public administration has been the source of debate. The debate began when
Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey's notion of the Community of Inquiry.
[32] Hugh Miller objected to one element of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude,
participatory democracy) – Scientific attitude.
[33] A debate that included responses from a practitioner,
[34] an economist,
[35] a planner,
[36] other public administration scholars,
[37][38] and noted philosophers
[39][40] followed. Miller
[41] and Shields
[42][43] also responded.
In addition, applied scholarship of
public administration that assesses
charter schools,
[44] contracting out or
outsourcing,
[45] financial management,
[46] performance measurement,
[47] urban quality of life initiatives,
[48] and
urban planning[49] in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the development of the
conceptual framework and focus of analysis.
[50][51][52]
The health sector's administrators' use of pragmatism, has been criticized as incomplete in its pragmatism, however.
[53]
According to the classical pragmatists, knowledge is always shaped by
human interests, and the administrator's focus on 'outcomes' simply
advances their own interest, but that this focus on outcomes often
undermines their citizen's interests, which often are more concerned
with process. On the other hand, David Brendel argues that pragmatism's
ability to bridge dualisms, focus on practical problems, include
multiple perspectives, incorporate participation from interested parties
(patient, family, health team), and provisional nature makes it well
suited to address problems in this area.
[54]
Pragmatism and feminism
Since the mid 1990s, feminist philosophers have re-discovered
classical pragmatism as a source of feminist theories. Works by
Seigfried,
[55] Duran,
[56] Keith,
[57] and Whipps
[58]
explore the historic and philosophic links between feminism and
pragmatism. The connection between pragmatism and feminism took so long
to be rediscovered because pragmatism itself was eclipsed by logical
positivism during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As a
result, it was lost from feminine discourse. The very features of
pragmatism that led to its decline are the characteristics that
feminists now consider its greatest strength. These are "persistent and
early criticisms of positivist interpretations of scientific
methodology; disclosure of value dimension of factual claims"; viewing
aesthetics as informing everyday experience; subordinating logical
analysis to political, cultural, and social issues; linking the dominant
discourses with domination; "realigning theory with praxis; and
resisting the turn to epistemology and instead emphasizing concrete
experience".
[59] These feminist philosophers point to
Jane Addams
as a founder of classical pragmatism. In addition, the ideas of Dewey,
Mead, and James are consistent with many feminist tenets. Jane Addams,
John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead developed their philosophies as all
three became friends, influenced each other, and were engaged in the
Hull-House experience and women’s rights causes.
Pragmatism and urbanism
One application of pragmatism that is being developed, is the one between pragmatism and
urbanism/
urban transformation. A pragmatic approach to urban transformation
values and evaluates the consequences of a design, rather than only
considering the initial intentions. According to the pragmatic maxim, an
object or conception can only be fully understood through its practical
consequences. In an urban context this signifies how the implementation
(and its effects) of a concept or design alters the overall
understanding of the concept.
[60] Richard Rorty
mentions that "a sea change" is occurring in recent philosophical
thought – "a change so profound that we may not recognize that it is
occurring." While the world that the movement is rooted in has had many
changes, as a frame to perceive the world, pragmatism also has
experienced different levels of modifications. Those changes are very
relevant to the development of cities and basic themes, such as
anti-foundationalism,
fallibilism,
community as inquirers, questioning the sharp distinction between theory and practice,
pluralism, and
democracy, of pragmatism may be applied to the urbanism even more strongly.
Vincent di Norcia argues that a pragmatic approach it is a suitable
regarding social issues because it requires a conduct that resolves
problems as it continuously assesses the practical consequences of a
project. This secures the interest for the stakeholders and Norcia
stresses the importance of social and cognitive pluralism. Social
pluralism means that we should recognize all stake holder's interest
that are affected by a certain decision, without putting weight on elite
political or economic group's interests. As a complement Norcia also
stresses cognitive pluralism, which indicates that one should include
all kinds of knowledge that are relevant to a problem.
[61]
Criticisms
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy criticized pragmatism in his 1908 essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms"
[62]
where he identifies thirteen different philosophical positions that
were each labeled pragmatism. Lovejoy argues that there is significant
ambiguity in the notion of the consequences of the
truth of a proposition and those of
belief in a proposition in order to highlight that many pragmatists had failed to recognize that distinction.
Neopragmatism as represented by Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by neoclassical pragmatists such as
Susan Haack
(Haack 1997) and by many analytic philosophers (Dennett 1998). Rorty's
early analytical work, however, differs notably from his later work
which some, including Rorty, consider to be closer to
literary criticism than to philosophy, and which, attracts the brunt of criticism from his detractors.
A list of pragmatists
Classical pragmatists (1850–1950)
|
Important protopragmatists or related thinkers
Fringe figures
| Notes |
| Giovanni Papini |
1881–1956 |
Italian essayist, mostly known because James occasionally mentioned him. |
| Giovanni Vailati |
1863–1909 |
Italian analytic and pragmatist philosopher. |
| Hu Shi |
1891–1962 |
Chinese intellectual and reformer, student and translator of Dewey's and advocate of pragmatism in China. |
| Reinhold Niebuhr |
1892–1971 |
American Philosopher and Theologian, inserted Pragmatism into his theory of Christian Realism. |
Neoclassical pragmatists (1950–present)
Neoclassical pragmatists stay closer to the project of the classical pragmatists than neopragmatists do.
| Notes |
| Sidney Hook |
1902–1989 |
a prominent New York intellectual and philosopher, a student of Dewey at Columbia. |
| Isaac Levi |
1930– |
seeks to apply pragmatist thinking in a decision-theoretic perspective. |
| Susan Haack |
1945– |
teaches at the University of Miami, sometimes called the intellectual granddaughter of C.S. Peirce, known chiefly for foundherentism. |
| Nicholas Rescher |
1928– |
advocates a methodological pragmatism that sees functional efficacy as evidentiating validity. |
|
Analytical, neo- and other pragmatists (1950–present)
|
(Often labelled neopragmatism as well.)
| Notes |
| Richard J. Bernstein |
1932– |
Author of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, The Pragmatic Turn |
| F. Thomas Burke |
1950– |
Author of What Pragmatism Was (2013), Dewey's New Logic
(1994). His work interprets contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy
of language, and philosophical logic through the lens of classical
American pragmatism. |
| Arthur Fine |
1937– |
Philosopher of Science who proposed the Natural Ontological Attitude to the debate of scientific realism. |
| Stanley Fish |
1938– |
Literary and Legal Studies pragmatist. Criticizes Rorty's and Posner's legal theories as "almost pragmatism"[63] and authored the afterword in the collection The Revival of Pragmatism.[64] |
| John Hawthorne |
|
Defends a pragmatist form of contextualism to deal with the lottery paradox in his Knowledge and Lotteries. |
| Clarence Irving Lewis |
1883–1964 |
|
| Joseph Margolis |
1924– |
still proudly defends the original Pragmatists and sees his recent
work on Cultural Realism as extending and deepening their insights,
especially the contribution of Peirce and Dewey, in the context of a rapprochement with Continental philosophy. |
| Hilary Putnam |
1926– |
in many ways the opposite of Rorty and thinks classical pragmatism was too permissive a theory. |
| Richard Rorty |
1931–2007 |
famous author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. |
| Willard van Orman Quine |
1908–2000 |
pragmatist philosopher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics. |
| Roberto Unger |
1947– |
in The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, advocates for a
"radical pragmatism," one that 'de-naturalizes' society and culture, and
thus insists that we can "transform the character of our relation to
social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just to change, little
by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that comprise
them." |
| Mike Sandbothe |
1961– |
Applied Rorty's neopragmatism to media studies and developed a new
branch that he called Media Philosophy. Together with authors such as
Juergen Habermas, Hans Joas, Sami Pihlstroem, Mats Bergmann, Michael
Esfeld, and Helmut Pape, he belongs to a group of European Pragmatists
who make use of Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, Brandom, Putnam, and other
representatives of American pragmatism in continental philosophy. |
| Richard Shusterman |
|
philosopher of art. |
| Jason Stanley |
1969– |
Defends a pragmatist form of contextualism against semantic varieties of contextualism in his Knowledge and Practical Interest. |
| Robert B. Talisse |
1970– |
defends an epistemological conception of democratic politics that is explicitly opposed to Deweyan democracy and yet rooted in a conception of social epistemology that derives from the pragmatism of Charles Peirce. His work in argumentation theory and informal logic also demonstrates pragmatist leanings. |
| Stephen Toulmin |
1922–2009 |
student of Wittgenstein, known especially for his The Uses of Argument. |
Other pragmatists
Legal pragmatists
Pragmatists in the extended sense
See also
References
Philosophy portal
Hilary Putnam asserts that the combination of antiskepticism and fallibilism is a central feature of pragmatism.
William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:The "Chicago Club" including Whitehead, Mead, and Dewey. Pragmatism is sometimes called American Pragmatism because so many of its proponents were and are Americans.
William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions.William James tried to show the meaningfulness of (some kinds of) spirituality but, like other pragmatists, did not see religion as the basis of meaning or morality.
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