Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce 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."Peirce, C.S. (1878), "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, 286–302. Reprinted often, including Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 388–410 and Essential Peirce v. 1, 124–141. See end of §II for the pragmatic maxim. See third and fourth paragraphs in §IV for the discoverability of truth and the real by sufficient investigation.
Origins Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey.Biesta, G.J.J. & Burbules, N. (2003). Pragmatism and educational research. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Peirce, Dewey, James, Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead.
The word pragmatic has existed in English since the 1500s, borrowed from French and derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma, meaning business, deed or act, is a noun derived from the verb prassein, to do. 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.James, William (1898), "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results", delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of California at Berkeley, August 26, 1898, and first printed in the University Chronicle 1, September 1898, pp. 287–310. Internet Archive Eprint. On p. 290: James credited Peirce again in 1906 lectures published in 1907 as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, see Lecture 2, fourth paragraph. James regarded Peirce's "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.In addition to James's lectures and publications on pragmatist ideas (Will to Believe 1897, etc.) wherein he credited Peirce, James also arranged for two paid series of lectures by Peirce, including the 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism. See pp. 261–264, 290–2, & 324 in Brent, Joseph (1998), Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, 2nd edition. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906Peirce, C.S., "The Founding of Pragmatism", manuscript written 1906, published in The Hound & Horn: A Harvard Miscellany v. II, n. 3, April–June 1929, pp. 282–285, see 283–284, reprinted 1934 as "Historical Affinities and Genesis" in Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 11–13, see 12. 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."
Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt,Peirce, C.S. (1877), The Fixation of Belief, Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, pp. 1–15. Reprinted often, including Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 358–387 and Essential Peirce v. 1, pp. 109–123). and said that, 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", 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 effects (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", Reprinted in Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 411–437, see 414. saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. 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 SchillerManuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Essential Peirce v. 2, pp. 451–462, see pp. 457–458. Peirce wrote: and, in a 1908 publication,Peirce, C. S. (1908). "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", Hibbert Journal 7, reprinted in Collected Papers v. 6, paragraphs 452–85, and in Essential Peirce v. 2, 434–450, and elsewhere. After discussing James, Peirce stated (Section V, fourth paragraph) as the specific occasion of his coinage "pragmaticism", journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini's declaration of pragmatism's indefinability: see, for example, Papini's "What Is Pragmatism Like", published in translation in October 1907 in Popular Science Monthly v. 71, pp. 351–358. his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce regarded his own views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them about the falsity of necessitarianism and about the reality of generals and habits understood in terms of potential concrete effects even if unactualized.
Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman 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 20th 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.
Core tenets
A few of the various but often interrelated positions 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 pragmatic theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate the 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 the 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. Joseph Margolis), 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 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 action of concrete thinking.
David L. Hildebrand summarized 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."
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. 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.Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson. Introduction to Pragmatism and Idealism European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.