Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophy that insists on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of both meaning and truth.

Pragmatism objects 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 acomplishing the believer's goals. For the 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. Pragmatism does not hold, however, that just anything that is useful or practical should be regarded as true, or anything that helps us to survive merely in the short-term; pragmatists argue that what should be taken as true is that which contributes the most good over the longest course. In practice, this means that for pragmatists, theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices — that is, one should be able to make predictions and test them (see: verificationism)— and that ultimately the needs of humankind should guide the path of human inquiry.

American philosophy
Pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s.

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 1870s, and were members of the same 'metaphysical club' or philosophical discussion group (for an excellent 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 &mdash; and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes &mdash; is a broad emphasis on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical in inquiry in general (particularly philosophical inquiry). 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 &mdash; its theory of truth &mdash; 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').

Putnam's neo-pragmatist summary
Hilary Putnam (a contemporary or 'neo' pragmatist) has characterised pragmatism in terms of these and other themes:


 * 1) the primacy of practice,
 * 2) the collapse of any broad-ranging fact/value dichotomy,
 * 3) antiscepticism, or the view that sceptical doubt, like any doubt, requires justification in order to be genuine, and
 * 4) 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.

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).

Some scholars have noted a similarity between pragmatism and some elements in Buddhist philosophical thought. William James himself noticed the similarity, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience that
 * "I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction ... but as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that."

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
 * 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)
 * F.C.S. Schiller (one of the most important pragmatists of his time, Schiller is largely forgotten today)

Neo-Classical Pragmatists
 * Susan Haack (teaches at the University of Miami, sometimes called the grand-daughter of C.S. Peirce)
 * Richard A. Posner (Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, law professor, and prolific author of scholarly articles and books)
 * Hilary Putnam

Neo-Pragmatists
 * Cornel West (important thinker on race, politics, and religion; operates under the sign of "prophetic pragmatism")
 * Richard Rorty (author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)
 * Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Pragmatists in the Extended Sense
 * Willard van Orman Quine (pragmatist philosopher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics)
 * Wilfrid Sellars (broad thinker, attacked foundationalism in the analytic tradition)
 * Rudolph Carnap (important exponent of logical positivism, teacher of Quine)
 * Clarence Irving Lewis
 * Frank P. Ramsey
 * Karl-Otto Apel
 * Nicholas Rescher

Legal Pragmatists
 * Stephen Breyer (U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice)
 * Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (justice of the Supreme Court of the United States)