What is pragmatism?

Question

I can look up the defintion on the web! I dont need someone to copy and paste it, i need it to be clarified in simpler terms, I get confused with the definitions that I have read on the web so far

Answer 1

pragmatism is word related to a philosophy. It basicallly means being practical. In other words when some one tried to define a concept or theory they are going to do some scientific study and base that theory on the practical reactions or outcomes used to test the theory. Rather thatn using ideas they actually use conclusive evidence of outcomes to validte the theory or concept. So you would conceive that something was possible based on being practical in what holds true.

Answer 2

Pragmatism is a philosophic school 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 anti-cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science and evolution, and fallibilism.

Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention in the 1980's due to a new school of philosophers putting forth a revised pragmatism that drew upon both analytic and Continental philosophy (Cf. neopragmatism; a school founded by Richard Rorty). In response to the neo-pragmatists, there has more recently arisen another new school of pragmatism that works strictly within the bounds of analytic philosophy (Cf. Misak's The New Pragmatists, 2007). The principle divide between these two schools of contemporary pragmatism is over the objectivity of truth. Neopragmatists like Rorty define truth as agreement within a community, whereas the analytic pragmatist school contend both that (1) the original pragmatists held a more objective concept of truth than the one put forth by the neopragmatists, and (2) that the classical pragmatists were right to hold a more objective concept of truth than the one put forth by the neopragmatists.

Answer 3

What Is Pragmatism

Answer 4

In a word - practical. If it is practical it is pragmatic especially if doesn't take moral or ethical consequences into consideration.

Answer 5

Philosophy way of evaluating theories: a philosophical view that a theory or concept should be evaluated in terms of how it works and its consequences as the standard for action and thought.

Answer 6

I really don't blame most of these people for doing what they just did, your attitude is that if it is the truth but it is not your personal knowledge then it is no good. What is that? Sometimes we have to deal with the truth in order to deal with personal knowledge. So sometimes it is beneficial to use cut and paste and simpler. Wouldn't you agree?

Answer 7

William James said it was "a new name for some old ways of thinking " .

Answer 8

The ability to hope for the best despite its historical rarity.

Answer 9

"Pragmatism is a philosophic school 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 anti-cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science and evolution, and fallibilism.
Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention in the 1980's due to a new school of philosophers putting forth a revised pragmatism that drew upon both analytic and Continental philosophy (Cf. neopragmatism; a school founded by Richard Rorty). In response to the neo-pragmatists, there has more recently arisen another new school of pragmatism that works strictly within the bounds of analytic philosophy (Cf. Misak's The New Pragmatists, 2007). The principle divide between these two schools of contemporary pragmatism is over the objectivity of truth. Neopragmatists like Rorty define truth as agreement within a community, whereas the analytic pragmatist school contend both that (1) the original pragmatists held a more objective concept of truth than the one put forth by the neopragmatists, and (2) that the classical pragmatists were right to hold a more objective concept of truth than the one put forth by the neopragmatists.
Origins



Charles Sanders Peirce: the American polymath who started it all.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s. The thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce (IPA: /pɝs/) and William James (both members of The Metaphysical Club) as well as John Dewey and 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, Immanuel Kant for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name "pragmatism", George Berkeley for his idealism, and J.S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism.
[edit]Pragmatist epistemology

The epistemology of the 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 not realist in a traditional robust sense of realism (what Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist: it assumes an external world which must be dealt with.


John Dewey says something is "made true" when it is verified. Contrary to what some critics think, he does not mean that people are free to construct a worldview as they see fit.
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 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')
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 most pragmatists, truth is what is useful in the long-term. For example, to believe that my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective (and therefore not true).
[edit]Making truth
Going back to James, pragmatists have often spoken of how truth is not ready made, but that jointly we and reality "make" truth. This idea has two senses, one which is unique to William James and F.C.S. Schiller, and another that is widely accepted by most pragmatists: (1) that truth is mutable, and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme.
(1) Mutability of truth
One major difference among the pragmatists about the definition of 'truth' is the question of whether beliefs can pass from being true to being untrue and back. For James, beliefs are not true until they have been made true by verification. James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving their utility in a person's specific situation. The opposite of this process is not falsification, but rather a belief ceasing to be a "live option." F.C.S. Schiller, on the other hand, very clearly asserted that beliefs could pass into and out of truth situationally. Schiller held that truth was relative to specific problems. If I stop to think about how to get home, the true answer will be whatever is useful to solving that problem. Later on, when faced with a different problem, what I came to believe when faced with the earlier problem may now be false. As my problems change and as the most useful way to solve a problem shifts, so does the property of truth.
C.S. Peirce thought the idea that beliefs could be true at one time but false at another (or true for one person but false for another) was one of the "seeds of death" by which James allowed his pragmatism to become "infected." Peirce avoided this position because he took the pragmatic theory to imply that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices (i.e. they should be subject to test), not that they should be tied to our specific problems or life needs. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as what would be the ultimate outcome (not any outcome in real time) of inquiry by a (usually) scientific community of investigators. John Dewey, while agreeing broadly with this definition, also 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. Both Peirce and Dewey clearly connect the definitions of truth and warranted assertability. Hilary Putnam, however, developed his internal realism around the idea that a belief is true if it is ideally epistemically justified. About James' and Schiller's account, Putnam says this:
Truth cannot simply be rational acceptability for one fundamental reason; truth is supposed to be a property of a statement that cannot be lost, whereas justification can be lost. The statement 'The earth is flat' was, very likely, rationally acceptable 3000 years ago; but it is not rationally acceptable today. Yet it would be wrong to say that 'the earth is flat' was true 3,000 years ago; for that would mean that the earth has changed its shape. (Putnam 1981, p. 55)

Rorty has also weighed in against James and Schiller:
Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: "true for me but not for you" and "true in my culture but not in yours" are weird, pointless locutions. So is "true then, but not now." [...] James would, indeed, have done better to say that phrases like "the good in the way of belief" and "what it is better for us to believe" are interchangeable with "justified" rather than with "true." (Rorty 1998, p. 2)

(2) Conceptual Relativity
Part of what James and Schiller mean by the phrase 'making truth' is their idea that we make things true by verifying them. This sense of 'making truth' has not been adopted by many other pragmatists. However, there is another sense to this phrase that nearly all pragmatists do adopt. It is the idea that there can be no truths without a conceptual scheme to express those truths. That is,
Unless we decide upon how we are going to use concepts like 'object', 'existence' etc., the question 'how many objects exist' does not really make any sense. But once we decide the use of these concepts, the answer to the above-mentioned question within that us or 'version', to put in Nelson Goodman's phrase, is no more a matter of 'convention'. (Maitra 2003 p. 40)
F.C.S. Schiller used the analogy of a chair to make clear what he meant by the phrase that truth is made: just as a carpenter makes a chair out of existing materials and doesn't create it out of nothing, truth is a transformation of our experience but that doesn't imply reality is something we're free to construct or imagine as we please.
[edit]Central pragmatist tenets

[edit]The primacy of practice
The pragmatist proceeds from the basic premise that the human capability of theorizing is integral to intelligent practice. Theory and practice are not separate spheres; rather, theories and distinctions are tools or maps for finding our way in the world. As John Dewey put it, 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 "[h]is effort had not been to practicalize intelligence but to intellectualize practice". (Quoted in Eldridge 1998, p. 5) Theory is an abstraction from direct experience and ultimately must return to inform experience in turn. Thus an organism navigating his or her environment is the grounds for pragmatist inquiry.
[edit]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 merely 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 act of concrete thinking, and so on. 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)
[edit]Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism
From the outset, classical 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. These philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to "correspondence" theories. Pragmatists criticized the former for its a priorism, and the latter because it it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain, psychologically and biologically, how the relation between knower and known 'works' in the world.
In The Fixation of Belief, C.S. Peirce denied that introspection and intuition (staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes) were valid methods for philosophical investigation. He argued that intuition could lead to faulty reasoning, e.g. when we reason intuitively about infinity. Furthermore, introspection does not give priviledged 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) In his Harvard Lectures in 1903, however, he became convinced that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology: what we do think is not what we should think. 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."

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