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Pragmatism

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 all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.

This article is about the philosophical movement. For other uses, see Pragmatism (disambiguation).

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."[1]

(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.

Epistemology

: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content.

Metaphysics

: 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 science

: 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.

Philosophy of language

Additionally, forms of , 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).

empiricism

Criticisms[edit]

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.[92] He identified 13 different philosophical positions that were each labeled pragmatism.[92]


The Franciscan friar Celestine Bittle presented multiple criticisms of pragmatism in his 1936 book Reality and the Mind: Epistemology.[93] 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".[93] 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.[93]


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.[94]: 17 [95]: 120–124  Hilary Putnam later argued that Russell "presented a mere caricature" of James's views[94]: 17  and a "misreading of James",[94]: 20  while Tom Burke argued at length that Russell presented "a skewed characterization of Dewey's point of view".[95]: 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.[94]: 17 [96] 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.[97]


Neopragmatism as represented by Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by other neopragmatists such as Susan Haack[98] and by many analytic philosophers.[99] 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.

 – Activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States

American philosophy

Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography

Communication Theory as a Field § Russill, pragmatism as an eighth tradition

 – Philosophical doctrine that relations are internal to their bearers

Doctrine of internal relations

 – American philosopher and historian of ideas

Morton White

New legal realism

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.

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.

at PhilPapers

Pragmatism

on In Our Time at the BBC

Pragmatism

on YouTube

A short film about the pragmatist revival

There are several peer-reviewed journals dedicated to pragmatism, for example