Pragmatism
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Pragmatism is a school of philosophy that originated with Charles Sanders Peirce (who first stated the pragmatic maxim) and came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James, and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth. Other important aspects of pragmatism include a thoroughgoing naturalism and anti-cartesianism, radical empiricism, a combination of metaphysical realism and psychologism sometimes termed instrumentalism, the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism and last but not least the primacy of practice.
Pragmatism flourished at a time when psychology and epistemology weren't considered separate disciplines, and is currently enjoying renewed attention, in part due to the loosened grip of analytic philosophy within academia and the rising popularity of naturalized epistemology.
Origins
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s. The thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce (IPA: /pɝs/), William James and John Dewey (all members of The Metaphysical Club) as well as George Herbert Mead figured most prominently in its overall direction. The term pragmatism was first used in print by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. Prompted by James' use of the term and its attribution to him, Peirce began writing and lecturing on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. Peirce eventually coined the new name pragmaticism to mark what he regarded as the original idea, more for clarity's sake than because he disagreed with James. (Menand 2001)
James and Pierce were inspired by several earlier thinkers, notably Alexander Bain, who examined the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying that a belief is a proposition on which a person is prepared to act. Earlier thinkers that inspired the pragmatists include David Hume for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action, Thomas Reid for his direct realism, Georg Hegel for his introduction of temporality into philosophy, Francis Bacon who coined the phrase "knowledge is power" and perhaps even the Ancient Sophists for their humanism and attention to informal logic.
Pragmatist epistemology
All pragmatist epistemology can be characterized by a broad emphasis on the importance of practical effects: how theoretical ideas affect the human way of life in general and the life of inquiry in particular. Put more formally, pragmatists are committed to an epistemological framework that interrelates causality and agency or rationality.
The epistemology of these early pragmatists was heavily influenced by Darwinian thinking. Pragmatists were not the first to see the relevance of evolution for theories of knowledge: the same rationale had convinced Schopenhauer that we should adopt biological idealism because what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is actually true. Pragmatism differs from this idealist account because it challenges the assumption that knowledge and action are two separate spheres, and that there exists an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond the sort of inquiry that organisms use to cope with life. Pragmatism, in short, provides what might be termed an ecological account of knowledge: inquiry is construed as a means by which organisms can get a grip on their environment. 'Real' and 'true' are labels that have a function in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of that context. It is plainly psychologist but also realist: it assumes an external world which must be dealt with.
A general tendency by philosophers to push all views into either the idealist or realist camp, as well as William James' occasional penchant for eloquence at the expense of public understanding, resulted in the widespread but false characterization of pragmatism as a form of subjectivism or idealism. 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 the representing the view that any idea that has practical utility is true. William James writes:
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 true 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')
Pragmatists do disagree with the view that beliefs must represent reality to be true - "Copying is one [and only one] genuine mode of knowing" says James (James 1907, p. 91) - and argue that beliefs are dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action. 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. However most pragmatists do not hold that anything that is practical or useful, or that anything that helps to survive merely in the short-term, should be regarded as true. For example, C.S. Peirce takes the pragmatic theory to imply that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices — they should be subject to test. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as the ultimate outcome (i.e. not a real point in time) of inquiry by a (usually) scientific community of investigators. In an alternate reading, Dewey characterized truthfulness as a species of the good: to state that something is true means stating that it is trustworthy or reliable and will remain so in every conceivable situation.
Central pragmatist tenets
The primacy of practice
The action of an organism in its environment is the basic perspective from which the pragmatist proceeds, and our human capability of theorizing is seen as integral to intelligent practice, not on a separate sphere altogether. Theories and distinctions are tools or maps for finding our way in the world. They abstract from our direct experience and ultimately have to "come back to" experience and explain the phenomena that gave rise to the theorizing, so rendering those phenomena more meaningful.
John Dewey noted that there is no question of theory versus practice but rather of intelligent practice versus uninformed, stupid practice.[citation needed] and noted in a conversation with William Pepperell Montague that "His effort had not been to practicalize intelligence but to intellectualize practice". (Quoted in Eldridge 1998, p. 5)
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 and because they don't realize that these are merely nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems, get entangled in all sorts of metaphysical and conceptual confusions. David L. Hildebrand sums 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." (Hildebrand 2003) Various examples are the "ultimate Being" of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it abstracts away from concrete thought, has nothing to do at all with thinking, and so on.
Naturalism and anti-cartesianism
From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with science. One of the problems with idealist and realist philosophy alike was their tendency to see human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp, and they resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to vague theories about "correspondence". Pragmatists critized the former because of its inability to relate meaningfully to the world as we experience it, and the latter because it is a hollow theory that takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain, psychologically and biologically, how the relation between knower and known actually works.
Richard Rorty expanded on these arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature where he criticized the 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.
The reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism
Hilary Putnam suggests that the reconciliation of antiskepticism and fallibilism is the central claim of American pragmatism. Peirce insisted 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. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to the modern academic skepsis in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is actually quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition.
Pragmatism in other fields of philosophy
While pragmatism started out simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field.
Philosophy of Science
In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments whose worth is measured not by whether the concepts and theories somehow mirror reality, but by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth doesn't matter, but is rather a specific solution to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science.
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 parts of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, explained by Quine as truths grounded only in meanings and independent of facts, and truths grounded in facts. The other is reductionism, which is 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 aren't 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 an actual context. The criticism of Schiller's book was nicely summarized by him near his death, in an essay entitled "Are All Men Mortal?" 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 attempts to construct a new logic to replace formal logic he has just decimated 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 actually dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic rather as one logical tool among others - or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. C.S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic. Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument, in essence an epistemological work, inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies.
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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.
William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:
[A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. [...] In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it [...] It is no explanation of our concrete universe(James 1907, pp. 8-9)
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. The result of the split between these two explanatory schemes that are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism, Schiller contends, is that mechanicistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests metaphysics as a tool that can aid inquiry and is only valuable insofar as it actually 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 postanalytical philosopher Daniel Dennett who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to adopt the intentional stance and 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 interesting answers to questions about the limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between science and religion, 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 Nature and Experience (1929) and half a century later Richard Rorty in his monumental Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body result from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category.
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Ethics
Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Both facts and values have cognitive content: knowledge is what we should believe, values are hypotheses about what is good in action. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Its basic idea is pretty straightforward: good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the Good Reasons approach. It predates other philosophers that 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 irrationalism. More realistically, it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait on adequate proof when making moral decisions.
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. [...] A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. (James 1896)
Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. (Edel 1993) In his classic article about the Three Independent Factors in Morals(Dewey 1930) he tried to integrate the three basic perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He holds that all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions and that the possibility of conflict between the three elements exists and cannot always be easily solved. (Anderson, SEP)
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; and stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education not as a preparation for life but life itself.[citation needed]
Dewey was opposed to other philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values can be best 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, because we're not always sure about what we want, or don't always know if what we want is what would really satisfy us, ethics is a fallible undertaking.
Aesthetics
John Dewey's Art and Experience, based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience. (Field, 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.
Philosophy of Religion
Both Dewey and James have 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.
It should be noted, from a general point of view, that 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) will not actually 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 actually heard. As such, pragmatism isn't antithetical to religion but it isn't an apologetic for faith either.
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Analytical, neoclassical and neopragmatism
Neopragmatism is a container for various thinkers, some of them radically opposed to each other, such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. The name is usually taken to mean that the thinkers in question significantly diverge from 'the big three' (Peirce, James, Dewey) either in their philosophical program (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in thought (C.I. Lewis was very critical of John Dewey). Important analytical thinkers include the aforementioned C.I. Lewis, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam and the early work of Richard Rorty. Stanley Fish, the later Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to continental thought.
Neoclassical pragmatism - a handy denominator but not in widespread circulation - denotes those thinkers that stay closer to the project of the classical pragmatists. Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (known for the theory of foundherentism) are probably the most famous ones. Contrary to what the name might suggest, neoclassical pragmatism is everything but conservative.
Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. Point in case is Stephen Toulmin whose thought dovetails nicely with that of the neoclassical pragmatists, but who arrived at it largely independently from either the classical or neoclassical tradition - namely via Wittgenstein who he calls, in retrospect "a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind" (foreword for Dewey 1929 in the 1988 edition, p. xiii) - and who doesn't commonly identify himself as a pragmatist. It is probable, considering the advent of postanalytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, that more philosophers will be influenced by pragmatist thought (Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine, is a good example) without necessarily publicly committing themselves to that philosophical school.
Contemporary echoes and ties
In the twentieth century, the movements of logical positivism, behaviorism, functionalism and ordinary language philosophy all have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics. However, logical positivism doesn't stress action like pragmatism does. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection.
Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character 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 like 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)
Criticism
Although many later pragmatists such as W.V.O. Quine were actually analytic philosophers, the most vehement criticisms of classical pragmatism came from within that school of thought. Especially Bertrand Russell was known for his vituperative attacks on what he thought was little more than epistemological relativism and short-sighted practicalism. Realists in general often could not fathom how pragmatists could seriously call themselves empirical or realist thinkers and thought pragmatist epistemology was but a disguised manifestation of idealism. (Hildebrand 2003)
Edmund Husserl criticized psychologism, a critical aspect of pragmatist epistemology, in his The Prolegomena of Pure Logic. Gottlob Frege, an important founder of analytic philosophy, did the same in his The Foundations of Arithmetic. Their criticism is honest but not decisive: it remains to be seen if indeed "psychology", because of its naturalism, had to miss entirely the accomplishment, the radical and genuine problem, of the life of the spirit" as Husserl claimed in The Vienna Lecture. It need hardly be said that pragmatists insist that the exact opposite is the case.
Pragmatism suffered another kind of depreciation: because of the immense popularity of analytic philosophy and its ahistorical attitude, after their deaths the classical pragmatists were either ignored, forgotten, or caricatured. This is especially the case with Schiller: secondary sources on the work of Schiller are extremely rare, as are his primary works. By some, Schiller is considered one of the philosophers who gave pragmatism a bad name by his over-the-top rhetoric and defense of a crude and unsophisticated form of pragmatism.[citation needed]
Neopragmatism in the vein of Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by neoclassical pragmatists such as Susan Haack (Haack 1997) and by many analytic philosophers (Dennett 1998). Rorty's early analytical work, however, differs notably from his later work which some including Rorty himself consider to be closer to literature criticism than to philosophy proper - most criticism is aimed at this latter phase of Rorty's thought.
A list of pragmatists
Classical pragmatists (1850-1950)
Important protopragmatists or related thinkers
Fringe figures
Neoclassical pragmatists (1950-)Neoclassical pragmatists stay closer to the project of the classical pragmatists than neopragmatists do.
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Analytical, neo- and other pragmatists (1950-)(Often labelled neopragmatism as well.)
Other pragmatistsLegal pragmatists
Pragmatists in the extended sense
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Bibliography
Bibliography
IEP Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy SEP Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Elizabeth Anderson. Dewey's Moral Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Douglas Browning, William T. Myers (Eds.) Philosophers of Process. 1998.
- Robert Burch. Charles Sanders Peirce. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- John Dewey. Donald F. Koch (ed.) Lectures on Ethics 1900–1901. 1991.
- Daniel Dennett. Postmodernism and Truth. 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. 1910.
- Abraham Edel. Pragmatic Tests and Ethical Insights. 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 Intrumentalism. 1998.
- Richard Field. John Dewey (1859-1952). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- David L. Hildebrand. Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism. 2003.
- David L. Hildebrand. The Neopragmatist Turn. Southwest Philosophy Review Vol. 19, no. 1. January, 2003.
- William James. Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy. 1907.
- William James The Will to Believe. 1896.
- Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club. 2001.
- W.V.O. Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Philosophical Review. January 1951.
- N. Rescher. Process Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Stephen Toulmin. The Uses of Argument. 1958.
Notes and other sources
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. 1993.
- Susan Haack. Vulgar Rortyism. Review in The New Criterion. November 1997.
Resources
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.
- C.S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear (paper)
- C.S. Peirce, A Definition of Pragmatism (paper)
- William James, Pragmatism (especially lectures I, II and VI)
- John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
- John Dewey, Three Independent factors in Morals (paper)
- John Dewey, A short catechism concerning truth (chapter)
- W.V.O. Quine, Three Dogmas of Empiricism (paper)
Secondary texts
- Cornelis De Waal, On Pragmatism
- Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
- Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question
- Abraham Edel, Pragmatic Tests and Ethical Insights
- D. S. Clarke, Rational Acceptance and Purpose
Online resources
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