Pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870.[1] Its origins are
often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce 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 considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and
action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality.[3]
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.
Contents
Origins
Core tenets
Anti-reification of concepts and theories
Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism
Reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism
Pragmatist theory of truth and epistemology
In other fields of philosophy
Philosophy of science
Logic
Metaphysics
Philosophy of mind
Ethics
Aesthetics
Philosophy of religion
Neopragmatism
Legacy and contemporary relevance
Effects on social sciences
Effects on public administration
Effects on feminism
Criticisms
List of pragmatists
Classical pragmatists (1850–1950)
Analytic, neo- and other pragmatists (1950–present)
Pragmatists in the extended sense
See also
References
Sources
Further reading
Additional bibliography
External links
Origins
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.
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 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",[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 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 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.
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 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, but
this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such relativism to be seriously misguided
(e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).
David L. Hildebrand summed 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."[15]:40
In 1868,[16] 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:[17] 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.[18] 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.
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).
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 does not
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
(1929) 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 proponent of
conceptual pragmatism because of this.[22]
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 do not 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 are not 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.
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 free will,
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
postanalytic 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).
Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about the limits of science, 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
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. 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' 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.
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 (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.
From a general point of view, 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 is not antithetical to religion but it is not 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 intellectual 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".
Neopragmatism
Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers that 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: for example, conceptual pragmatist C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey;
neopragmatist Richard Rorty disliked Peirce.
Important analytic pragmatists include early Richard Rorty (who was the first to develop neopragmatist
philosophy in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979),[23] Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, and
Donald Davidson. 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".[24] Late Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to
Continental thought.
Neopragmatist thinkers who are more loyal to classical pragmatism include Sidney Hook and Susan
Haack (known for the theory of foundherentism). 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 methodological pragmatism, based on construing
pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its evidentiation.[25] Rescher is also a
proponent of pragmatic idealism.
Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. With the advent of postanalytic philosophy and the
diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, many philosophers were 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. French pragmatism has more recently made inroads into American sociology
as well.[26][27][28]
Philosophers John R. Shook and Tibor Solymosi said that "each new generation rediscovers and
reinvents its own versions of pragmatism by applying the best available practical and scientific methods
to philosophical problems of contemporary concern".[29]
Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its
nominalist character (although Peirce's pragmatism is not nominalist[14]) 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. Applied fields like public
administration,[30] political science,[31] leadership studies,[32] international relations,[33] conflict
resolution,[34] and research methodology[35] have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism in their field.
Often this connection is made using Dewey and Addams's expansive notion of democracy.
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][37]
Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach which is both pluralist and practical.[38]
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.[41] Hugh Miller objected to one element of the community
of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy): scientific attitude.[42] A
debate that included responses from a practitioner,[43] an economist,[44] a planner,[45] other public
administration scholars,[46][47] and noted philosophers[48][49] followed. Miller[50] and Shields[51][52] also
responded.
In addition, applied scholarship of public administration that assesses charter schools,[53] contracting out
or outsourcing,[54] financial management,[55] performance measurement,[56] urban quality of life
initiatives,[57] and urban planning[58] in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the
development of the conceptual framework and focus of analysis.[59][60][61]
The health sector's administrators' use of pragmatism has been criticized as incomplete in its pragmatism,
however,[62] according to the classical pragmatists, knowledge is always shaped by human interests. The
administrator's focus on "outcomes" simply advances their own interest, and 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.[63]
Effects on feminism
Since the mid 1990s, feminist philosophers have re-discovered classical pragmatism as a source of
feminist theories. Works by Seigfried,[64] Duran,[65] Keith,[66] and Whipps[67] 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 femininist 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".[68] 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.
Criticisms
In the 1908 essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms", Arthur Oncken Lovejoy argued that there's significant
ambiguity in the notion of the effects 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.[69] He identified thirteen
different philosophical positions that were each labeled pragmatism.
Franciscan monk Celestine Bittle presented multiple criticisms of pragmatism in his 1936 book Reality
and the Mind: Epistemology.[70] He argued that, in William James's pragmatism, truth is entirely
subjective and is not the widely accepted definition of truth, which is correspondence to reality. For
Bittle, defining truth as what is useful is a "perversion of language".[70] With truth reduced essentially to
what is good, it is no longer an object of the intellect. Therefore, the problem of knowledge posed by the
intellect is not solved, but rather renamed. Renaming truth as a product of the will cannot help it solve the
problems of the intellect, according to Bittle. Bittle cited what he saw as contradictions in pragmatism,
such as using objective facts to prove that truth does not emerge from objective fact; this reveals that
pragmatists do recognize truth as objective fact, and not, as they claim, what is useful. Bittle argued there
are also some statements that cannot be judged on human welfare at all. Such statements (for example the
assertion that "a car is passing") are matters of "truth and error" and do not affect human welfare.[70]
British philosopher Bertrand Russell devoted a chapter each to James and Dewey in his 1945 book A
History of Western Philosophy; Russell pointed out areas in which he agreed with them but also ridiculed
James's views on truth and Dewey's views on inquiry.[71]:17[72]:120–124 Hilary Putnam later argued that
Russell "presented a mere caricature" of James's views[71]:17 and a "misreading of James",[71]:20 while
Tom Burke argued at length that Russell presented "a skewed characterization of Dewey's point of
view".[72]:121 Elsewhere, in Russell's book The Analysis of Mind, Russell praised James's radical
empiricism, to which Russell's own account of neutral monism was indebted.[71]:17[73] Dewey, in The
Bertrand Russell Case, defended Russell against an attempt to remove Russell from his chair at the
College of the City of New York in 1940.[74]
Neopragmatism as represented by Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by other
neopragmatists such as Susan Haack (Haack 1997) and by many analytic philosophers (Dennett 1998).
Rorty's early analytic 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.
List of pragmatists
Additional figures
Name Lifetime Notes Name Lifetime Notes
Giovanni 1881– Italian essayist, Cornel 1953– thinker on race, politics, and religion;
Papini 1956 mostly known West operates under the sign of "prophetic
because James pragmatism".
occasionally
mentioned him. broad thinker, attacked mainstream
Wilfrid 1912–
variants of foundationalism in the
Sellars 1989
Italian analytic analytic tradition.
Giovanni 1863–
and pragmatist
Vailati 1909 Frank P. 1903– author of the philosophical work
philosopher.
Ramsey 1930 Universals.
Chinese
intellectual and Karl-Otto 1922– author of "Charles S. Peirce: From
reformer, Apel 2017 Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (1981)"
student and
1891– Randolph 1886– author of the 1917 pragmatist anti-
Hu Shih translator of
1962 Bourne 1918 war essay "Twilight of Idols"
Dewey's and
advocate of author of Sociology and Pragmatism:
pragmatism in C. Wright 1916–
the Higher Learning in America and
China. Mills 1962
was a commentator on Dewey.
American Jürgen author of "What is Universal
philosopher and 1929–
Habermas Pragmatics?"
theologian,
Reinhold 1892– inserted
Niebuhr 1971 pragmatism into
his theory of
Christian
realism.
See also
American philosophy
Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography
Doctrine of internal relations
Holistic pragmatism
New legal realism
Pragmatism as a tradition of communication theory
Pragmatic model
Realpolitik
References
1. Hookway, Christopher (August 16, 2008). "Pragmatism" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr
agmatism/). In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010
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2. 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, 124–41. 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.
3. William James (1909). The Meaning of Truth (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5117/5117-h/5
117-h.htm). Retrieved March 5, 2015.
4. Susan Haack; Robert Edwin Lane (April 11, 2006). Pragmatism, old & new: selected
writings. Prometheus Books. pp. 18–67. ISBN 978-1-59102-359-3.
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6. 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
(https://archive.org/stream/philosophicalcon00jameuoft#page/n4/mode/1up). On p. 290 (http
s://archive.org/stream/philosophicalcon00jameuoft#page/290/mode/1up):
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.
7. See James (1897), Will to Believe (which James dedicated to Peirce), see p. 124 and
footnote via Google Books Eprint (https://books.google.com/books?id=wRMXL4uYEegC&p
g=PA124):
Indeed, it may be said that if two apparently different definitions of the reality
before us should have identical consequences, those two definitions would
really be identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by the
different verbiage in which they are expressed.¹
¹ See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science," by C. S.
Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts clear," [sic] in
the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
See also James's 1907 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture
2, fourth paragraph.
8. 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. 261–4, 290–2, & 324 in
Brent, Joseph (1998), Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, 2nd edition.
9. Peirce, 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. 282–5, see 283–4,
reprinted 1934 as "Historical Affinities and Genesis" in Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs
11–13, see 12.
10. Shook, John (undated), "The Metaphysical Club", the Pragmatism Cybrary. Eprint (http://ww
w.pragmatism.org/research/metaphysical_club.htm).
11. Peirce, C. S. (1877), The Fixation of Belief, Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, pp. 1–15.
Reprited often, including Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 358–87 and Essential Peirce v.
1, pp. 109–23).
12. Peirce, on p p. 165 (https://books.google.com/books?id=j6oLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA165)–166 in
"What Pragmatism Is", The Monist, v. XV, n. 2, April 1905, pp. 161–81, reprinted in
Collected Papers v. 5, paragraphs 411–37, see 414.
13. Manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Essential Peirce v. 2, pp. 451–62, see pp. 457–8.
Peirce wrote:
I have always fathered my pragmaticism (as I have called it since James and
Schiller made the word [pragmatism] imply "the will to believe," the mutability of
truth, the soundness of Zeno's refutation of motion, and pluralism generally),
upon Kant, Berkeley, and Leibniz. ...
14. Peirce, C. S. (1908) "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", Hibbert Journal 7,
reprinted in Collected Papers v. 6, paragraphs 452–85, Essential Peirce v. 2, 434–50, 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 "What Is
Pragmatism Like", a translation published in October 1907 in Popular Science Monthly v.
71, pp. 351–8, Google Books Eprint (https://books.google.com/books?id=DKkWAAAAYAAJ
&pg=PA351)). Peirce in his closing paragraph wrote that "willing not to exert the will (willing
to believe)" should not be confused with "active willing (willing to control thought, to doubt,
and to weigh reasons)", and discussed his dismay by that which he called the other
pragmatists' "angry hatred of strict logic". He also rejected their nominalist tendencies. 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.
15. Hildebrand, David L. (2003). Beyond realism and antirealism: John Dewey and the
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Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
Ramsey, F.P. (1927), "Facts and Propositions", Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume
7, 153–170. Reprinted, pp. 34–51 in F.P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor
(ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1990.
Ramsey, F.P. (1990), Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK.
Rescher, N. (1977), Methodological Pragmatism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.
Rescher, N. (2000), Realistic Pragmatism, Albany, SUNY Press, 2000.
Further reading
Surveys
John J. Stuhr, ed. One Hundred Years of Pragmatism: William James's Revolutionary
Philosophy (Indiana University Press; 2010) 215 pages; Essays on pragmatism and
American culture, pragmatism as a way of thinking and settling disputes, pragmatism as a
theory of truth, and pragmatism as a mood, attitude, or temperament.
Important introductory primary texts
Note that this is an introductory list: some important works are left out and some less monumental works
that are excellent introductions are included.
Secondary texts
Criticism texts
Edward W. Younkins, Dewey's Pragmatism and the Decline of Education (http://rebirthofrea
son.com/Articles/Younkins/Deweys_Pragmatism_and_the_Decline_of_Education.shtml).
Pragmatism (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pragmatism.html), Ayn Rand Lexicon.
Albert Schinz, Anti-Pragmatism: An Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual
Aristocracy and Social Democracy. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1909.
Additional bibliography
IEP – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.iep.utm.edu)
SEP – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu)
James Sloan Allen. William James on Habit, Will, Truth, and the Meaning of Life. 2014.
Elizabeth Anderson. Dewey's Moral Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-mor
al/). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Douglas Browning, William T. Myers (Eds.) Philosophers of Process. 1998.
Robert Burch. Charles Sanders Peirce (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/). Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
F. Thomas Burke. What Pragmatism Was (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/806840).
2013.
John Dewey. Donald F. Koch (ed.) Lectures on Ethics 1900–1901. 1991.
Daniel Dennett. Postmodernism and Truth (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/postmod.tru.
htm). 1998.
John Dewey. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action.
1929.
John Dewey. Three Independent Factors in Morals. 1930.
John Dewey. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays (https://web.archive.
org/web/20070126081521/http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Dewey/Dewey_1910b/Dewey
_1910_toc.html). 1910.
John Dewey. Experience & Education. 1938.
Cornelis De Waal. On Pragmatism. 2005.
Raff Donelson. "Ethical Pragmatism" (https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12253). Metaphilosophy
48(4): 383-403. 2017.
Abraham Edel. Pragmatic Tests and Ethical Insights (https://web.archive.org/web/20061207
201054/http://crvp.org/book/Series01/I-11/chapter_i.htm). In: Ethics at the Crossroads:
Normative Ethics and Objective Reason. George F. McLean, Richard Wollak (eds.) 1993.
Michael Eldridge. Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism. 1998.
Lorenzo Fabbri. The domestication of Derrida: Rorty, pragmatism and deconstruction (http
s://www.academia.edu/998044/The_Domestication_of_Derrida_Rorty_Pragmatism_and_De
construction). 2008
Richard Field. John Dewey (1859-1952) (http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/dewey.htm#H5). Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Peter H. Hare, Michel Weber, James K. Swindler, Oana-Maria Pastae, Cerasel Cuteanu
(eds.), International Perspectives on Pragmatism (https://www.academia.edu/280925/Intern
ational_Perspectives_on_Pragmatism), Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2009 (ISBN 978-1-4438-0194-2).
David L. Hildebrand. Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism. 2003.
David L. Hildebrand. The Neopragmatist Turn. Southwest Philosophy Review 19(1). 2003.
William James. Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular
Lectures on Philosophy (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5116). 1907.
William James The Will to Believe (http://arquivo.pt/wayback/20090714151749/http://falcon.j
mu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html). 1896.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its
Challenge to Western Thought. 1999.
Todd Lekan. Making Morality: Pragmatist Reconstruction in Ethical Theory. 2003.
C.I. Lewis. Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge. 1929.
David Macarthur. "Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism and the Problem of Normativity,"
Philosophical Topics Vol. 36 no.1, 2009.
Keya Maitra. On Putnam. 2003.
Joseph Margolis. Historied Thought, Constructed World. 1995.
Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club. 2001.
Cheryl Misak (ed.) The New Pragmatists. Oxford University Press, 2007
Hilary Putnam Reason, Truth and History. 1981.
W.V.O. Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism (http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html).
Philosophical Review. January 1951.
W.V.O. Quine Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. 1969.
N. Rescher. Process Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/). The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Richard Rorty Rorty Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Volume 3. 1998.
Stephen Toulmin. The Uses of Argument. 1958.
Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics (https://www.acade
mia.edu/279952/After_Whitehead_Rescher_on_Process_Metaphysics), Frankfurt / Paris /
Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2004 (ISBN 3-937202-49-8).
Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism. Jamesian Applications (https://www.academia.e
du/392183/Whiteheads_Pancreativism._Jamesian_Applications), Frankfurt / Paris, Ontos
Verlag, 2011.
William Egginton/Mike Sandbothe (Eds.) The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy. Contemporary
Engagement between Analytic and Continental Thought. 2004.
Mike Sandbothe. Pragmatic Media Philosophy. 2005.
Papers and online encyclopedias are part of the bibliography. Other sources may include
interviews, reviews and websites.
Gary A. Olson and Stephen Toulmin. Literary Theory, Philosophy of Science, and
Persuasive Discourse: Thoughts from a Neo-premodernist. Interview in JAC 13.2 (https://we
b.archive.org/web/20060901100934/http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/13.2/Articles/1.htm). 1993.
Susan Haack. "Vulgar Rortyism" (https://web.archive.org/web/20181005061750/https://ww
w.newcriterion.com/archive/16/nov97/menand.htm). Review in The New Criterion.
November 1997.
Pietarinen, A. V. "Interdisciplinarity and Peirce's classification of the Sciences: A Centennial
Reassessment," Perspectives on Science, 14(2), 127–152 (2006).
External links
General sources
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