Pragmatism

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Pragmatism, as a school of philosophy, is a collection of many different ways of thinking. Given the diversity among thinkers and the variety among schools of thought that have adopted this term over the years, the term pragmatism has become all but meaningless in the absence of further qualification. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists point to some connection with practical consequences or real effects as vital components of both meaning and truth. The precise character of these links to pragmata is however as diverse as the thinkers who do the pointing.

Some pragmatists object to the view that beliefs represent reality, and instead argue that beliefs are dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful a disposition proves in accomplishing the believer's goals. For this type of pragmatist it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire meaning, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true. As a rule, however, pragmatists do not hold that anything that is practical or useful, or that anything that helps to survive merely in the short-term, should be regarded as true. Instead, most of them argue that what should be taken as true is that which contributes the most good over the longest course. In the case of C.S. Peirce's pragmatism, this means that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices — that is, one should be able to make predictions and test them. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as the ultimate outcome of inquiry by a (usually) scientific community of investigators. For William James and many of his followers, the meaning of any term consisted, rather, in the grasping of the consequences for action that the acceptance of the truth of the term entails. Truth itself, on this view, is not that which contributes the most good to the community, but that which contributes the most good to the individual.

1 American philosophy
2 Putnam's neo-pragmatist summary
3 Pragmatism in history
4 Relationships to other views
5 Notable pragmatists
6 Notes and references
7 See also
8 External Links

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American philosophy

As a concerted philosophical movement, pragmatism is usually considered to have originated in the United States in the late 1800s, with the thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead figuring most prominently in its overall direction. These originators, however, typically point back to the influence of several earlier thinkers, with especial mention of Immanuel Kant and Alexander Bain, the latter having forged the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying that a belief is that on which a person is prepared to act.

Like any philosophical movement, the nature and content of pragmatism is a subject of considerable debate, whether it is one of exegesis (determining what the original pragmatists thought it was) or subtantive philosophical theory (what is the most defensible theory that satisfies certain goals). The term pragmatism was first used in print by William James, who attributed the doctrine to Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce later went on to disavow the term in favour of pragmaticism, in order to distinguish his views from those of James and the other two major pragmatist thinkers of the time, John Dewey and F.C.S. Schiller. Peirce and James were colleagues at Harvard in the 1870's, and were members of the same 'metaphysical club' or philosophical discussion group (for an account of which, see the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Louis Menand). Dewey was educated in Vermont but is most commonly associated with the University of Chicago, though he also taught at Michigan and Columbia, and briefly at the University of Minnesota.

What is common to all three thinkers' philosophy — and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes — is a broad emphasis on the importance of practical effects in connection with theoretical ideas as they impact on the human way of life in general and the life of inquiry in particular. One famous aspect of this view is Peirce's insistence that contrary to Descartes' famous and influential method in the Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created for the purpose of conducting philosophical inquiry. Doubt, like belief, requires justification, that is, it arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (from what 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.

Perhaps the most notorious pragmatist view — its theory of truth — appears frequently in James' work, but occupies a much smaller portion of the work of Peirce and Dewey. This theory is often caricatured in contemporary literature as the view that 'truth is what works', or that any idea that has practical utility is true. In reality the theory is a great deal more subtle, and bears a striking resemblance to better-respected contemporary views, particularly Crispin Wright's 'superassertibility' (see his book 'Truth & Objectivity').

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Putnam's neo-pragmatist summary

Hilary Putnam <ref> Hilary Putnam (1994). Words and Life. (Ed. by J. Conant) Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674956079 </ref> characterised pragmatism in these terms:

The primacy of practice,
The collapse of any broad-ranging fact/value dichotomy,
antiscepticism, or the view that sceptical doubt, like any doubt, requires justification in order to be genuine, and
Fallibilism: that there is never an absolute or metaphysical guarantee that a given belief is true and will never, therefore, be revised.

Putnam goes on to suggest that the reconciliation of antiscepticism and fallibilism is the central claim of American pragmatism.

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Pragmatism in history

A useful general account of pragmatism's origins during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. According to Menand, pragmatism took form largely in response to the work of Charles Darwin (evolution, ongoing process, and a non-epistemological view of history), statistics (the recognition of the role of randomness in the unfolding of events, and of the presence of regularity within randomness), American democracy (values of pluralism and consensus applied to knowledge as well as politics), and in particular the American Civil War (a rejection of the sort of absolutizing or dualizing claims [i.e., to Truth] that provide the philosophical underpinnings of war).

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Relationships to other views

Each of the founding pragmatists have their own different set of philosophers who they connected their pragmatism to. Peirce and F.C.S. Schiller derive their inspiration for pragmatism mainly from the work of Immanuel Kant. William James, however, states that he thinks pragmatism best goes around Kant rather than through him. The non-pragmatist James gives most of the credit for his pragmatism to is J.S. Mill, to whom he dedicates his lecture series Pragmatism.

Other philosophers important to C.S. Peirce’s development of pragmatism include: the scholastic realist Duns Scotus, the nineteenth-century positivist Auguste Comte, and the idealist George Berkeley. However, none of these philosophers influence comes close to the influence of Immanuel Kant on Peirce’s pragmatism. Kant shows deep affinities with pragmatism.

In the twentieth-century, the movements of logical positivism, behaviorism, and ordinary language philosophy all have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics. However, there is not the stress on action in logical positivism as there is in pragmatism. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to construct correct metaphysical doctrines (empirically verifiable ones) rather than reject metaphysics.

Ordinary language philosophy does not resemble pragmatism in many respects, but it does lay stress upon the connection between meaning and action in a way logical positivism does not.

Pragmatism has important ties to process philosophy. Each of the classical pragmatists formulated a type of process metaphysics, and much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, who aren't usually considered pragmatists. <ref name="DB">Douglas Browning, William T. Myers (Eds.) (1998). Philosophers of Process (Revised Expanded Edition). Bronx: Fordham University Press. ISBN 0823218783</ref> <ref>Rescher, N. "Process Philosophy". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ </ref> Richard Rorty has pointed to strong connections between pragmatism and existentialism.<ref>Richard Rorty (2000). Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin. ISBN 0140262881</ref> Nietzsche is also sometimes considered a process philosopher,<ref name="DB" /> and his work has other similarities with pragmatism. Nietzsche and pragmatism also share a common influence in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. <ref>Goodman, R. "Ralph Waldo Emerson". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed.) Edward N. Zalta URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emerson/</ref>. A form of pragmatism has also been attributed to Heidegger.<ref>Mark Okrent (1991). Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801499623 </ref>

Some scholars have noted a similarity between pragmatism and some elements in Buddhist philosophical thought.<ref>Miranda Shaw (1987). "William James and Yogaacaara philosophy: A comparative inquiry". Philosophy East and West volume 37, no.3. pp. 223-244}</ref> <ref>Richard P. Hayes, "Did Buddhism Anticipate Pragmatism?" (pdf) </ref>

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Notable pragmatists

Classical pragmatists

John Dewey (prominent philosopher of education, referred to his brand of pragmatism as instrumentalism)

William James (influential psychologist and theorist of religion, as well as philosopher. First to be widely associated with the term "pragmatism" due to Peirce's lifelong unpopularity.)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (later called by Peirce pragmaticism), an extender of the Scotistic theory of signs (called by Peirce semeiotic), an extraordinarily prolific logician and mathematician, and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system. A practicing chemist and geodesist by profession, he nevertheless considered scientific philosophy, and especially logic, to be his vocation. In the course of his polymathic researches, he wrote on a wide range of topics, from mathematical logic to psychology.

George Herbert Mead (philosopher and social psychologist)

Reinhold Niebuhr (theologian and social critic, though many deny he was a pragmatist; he was extremely critical of Dewey)

Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Vailati

Josiah Royce (colleague of James who employed pragmatism in an idealist metaphysical framework, he was particularly interested in the philosophy of religion and community; his work is often associated with neo-Hegelianism)

George Santayana (often not considered to be a canonical pragmatist, he applied pragmatist methodologies to naturalism (philosophy), exemplified in his early masterwork, The Life of Reason)