Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a school of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. Pragmatism is characterized by the insistence on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of truth. Pragmatism objects to the view that human concepts and intellect alone accurately represent reality, and therefore stands in opposition to both formalist and rationalist schools of philosophy. Rather, pragmatism holds it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories and data acquire significance. 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 most contributes to the most human good over the longest course. In practice, this means that for pragmatists, theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices--i.e., that one should be able to make predictions and test them--and that ultimately the needs of humankind should guide the path of human inquiry. Pragmatism is undergoing a recent resurgence. The focus of Pragmatism was to find an objectively verifiable technique to test the "truth" of our "knowledge". This was a reaction to the foundational alternatives of 1) deduction from absolute truths/rationalism or 2) induction from observable phenomena/empiricism. This approach is often confused with the latter form of foundationalism, but is differentiated by the active process of postulation/theorizing and subsequent testing through attempts at application of the theory and verification of the theory's ability to predict and control the environment, rather than merely relabeling patterns of phenomena with generalizations as attempted by the inductive method. Pragmatism, through Charles Sanders Peirce, was the first attempt to put forth what we now recognize as the scientific method as a philosophical theory of epistemology. A theory that proves itself more successful in predicting and controlling our world than its predecessor is said to be nearer the "truth." Truth in this theory is a matter of degree, constantly open to improvement. The objectivity provided by having our knowledge directly connected through a chain of logic, which was traditionally thought to be provided by the foundationalist theories of rationalism and empiricism, is recognized as an illusion by this approach. True objectivity can never be deduced from immutable truths or perceived directly in the environment, but it can be postulated to exist, and to be used as the objective measure of the accuracy of our "knowledge" in the form of theories. In this sense, "Truth" and "Reality" are akin to the Platonic Forms, with our knowledge being merely our mental shadows, which are attempting to depict the unreachable reality, and it is through the scientific method of postulation and verification that allows us to touch reality and be steered and comforted by its guidance.

American philosophy

Pragmatism is perhaps the only peculiarly American school of philosophy. The name denotes a concern for the practical, taking human action and its consequences as the basic measure of truth, value, etc. This translates to experimentation not merely as a method of scientific investigation but as the primary way humans engage each other and the world around them. Different pragmatists have different models of experimentation—some are basically scientific (Charles Sanders Peirce), others so pluralistic and relativist (William James) as to be almost anti-scientific. However, all pragmatists embrace some process(es) of ongoing inquiry and transformation of knowledge as part of the basic task of human societies.

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).

Notable 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), though he would have preferred "humanist")
• 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, ranging from mathematical logic to psychology.
• George Herbert Mead (philosopher and social psychologist)
• Reinhold Niebuhr (theologian and social critic)
• Hilary Putnam (though not in the core canon of the neo-pragmatists)
• Willard van Orman Quine (pragmatist philosopher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics)
• Richard Rorty (controversial neo-pragmatist)
• Wilfrid Sellars (broad thinker, attacked foundationalism in the analytic tradition)
• Cornel West (important thinker on race, politics, and religion; operates under the sign of "prophetic pragmatism")
• 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)
• Susan Haack (teaches at the University of Miami, sometimes called the grand-daughter of C.S. Peirce)

References

• The Pragmatism Cybrary
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • Pragmatist Feminism