Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentalism, radical empiricism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.
Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) deserves most of the credit for pragmatism,[1] along with later twentieth century contributors William James, John Dewey and George Santayana.
Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Another brand of pragmatism, known sometimes as neopragmatism, gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late 20th-century pragmatists. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. The word pragmatism derives from Greek πρᾶγμα (pragma), "deed, act",[2] which comes from πράσσω (prassō), "to pass over, to practise, to achieve".[3]
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Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States in the 1870s. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce ( /ˈpɜrs/ like "purse"), William James, and Chauncey Wright, as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.
The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s.[4] James regarded Peirce's 1877–8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series (including "The Fixation of Belief", 1877 and especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", 1878) as the foundation of pragmatism .[5][6] Peirce in turn wrote in 1906[7] that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act." Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism." John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."[8]
Inspiration for the various pragmatists included:
Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt[9] 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"[10] — which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to a conception of that object's effects to a general extent of the effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. It 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, though he himself 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 actual consequences (or test results) themselves; a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but actual outcomes are not meanings but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition",[11] 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.[12] and, in a 1908 publication,[13] 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.[13]
Pragmatism is based on the premise that the human capability to theorize is necessary for 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 practice.
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)
A summary of which can conclude that pragmatism is subjugated by perception.
From the outset, 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 of knowledge and truth. Pragmatists criticized the former for its a priorism, and the latter because 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 1868,[14] C.S. Peirce argued there 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[15]: 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.[16] 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.
Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a 'God's-eye-view,' this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope,[17] that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough,[10] and (2) contrary to Descartes' famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat so as to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt.[18] Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act.[10] It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which 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 modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is actually quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition.
The epistemology of early pragmatism was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin. Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms use to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with.
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).
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. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views.
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 doesn't 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 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 'conceptual pragmatist' because of this. (Lewis 1929)
Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolph 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 don't 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 aren't a priori truths but synthetic statements.
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 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 actually 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 actually an epistemological work).
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 mechanistic 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 that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only 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 religion and science, where it is often assumed - most pragmatists would disagree - that science degrades everything that is meaningful into 'merely' physical phenomena.
Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature (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 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.
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. 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.
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 Three Independent Factors in Morals (Dewey 1930), he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements 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. 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.
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.
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. (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.
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.
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.
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.
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", though 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 is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers, some of them radically opposed to one another. The name neopragmatist signifies that the thinkers in question 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 actual conceptual formation (C.I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey; Richard Rorty dislikes Peirce). Important analytical neopragmatists include the aforementioned Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam and the early Richard Rorty. 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."[19] Stanley Fish, the later Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to continental thought.
Neoclassical pragmatism denotes those thinkers who consider themselves inheritors of the project of the classical pragmatists. Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (known for the theory of foundherentism) are well-known examples, as are the many publications by Nicholas Rescher which advocate his version of "methodical pragmatism" based on construing pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its evidentiation.
Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. 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 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 like Bruno Latour, Michel Crozier and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. It is often seen as opposed to structural problems connected to the French Critical Theory of Pierre Bourdieu.
In the twentieth century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy 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)
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.
Symbolic interactionism, a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism in the early 20th century, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, as well as that of Pierce and William James.[20]
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 [21][22]
Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach which is both pluralist and practical.[23]
The classical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of Public Administration. Scholars claim classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of Public Administration.[24][25] At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for making programs "work" in a pluralistic, problems-oriented environment. Public administrators are also responsible for the day-to-day work with citizens. Dewey's participatory democracy can be applied in this environment. Dewey and James' notion of theory as a tool, helps administrators craft theories to resolve policy and administrative problems. Further, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists.
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.[26] Hugh Miller objected to one element of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy) - Scientific attitude.[27] A debate that included responses from a practitioner,[28] an economist,[29] a planner,[30] other Public Administration Scholars,[31][32] and noted philosophers [33][34] followed. Miller [35] and Shields [36][37] also responded.
In addition, applied scholarship of public administration that assesses charter schools,[38] contracting out or outsourcing,[39] financial management,[40] performance measurement,[41] urban quality of life initiatives,[42] and urban planning[43] in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the development of the conceptual framework and focus of analysis.
Since the mid 1990s, feminist philosophers have re-discovered classical pragmatism as a source of feminist theories. Works by Seigfried,[44] Duran,[45] Keith,[46] and Whipps [47] 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 20th century. As a result it was lost from feminine 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”.[48] 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 & 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.
From the very beginning, pragmatists have been vague about what "pragmatism" is (a method? a theory of truth? a theory of meaning?), and positions as divergent as direct realism and extreme social constructivism have been characterized as "pragmatist". This drew criticism regarding its somewhat ill-defined nature.
One of the first to recognize these problems was Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, whose 1908 essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms"[49] identifies thirteen different philosophical positions that were each labeled pragmatism. Lovejoy notes the ambiguity in the notion of the consequences of the truth of a proposition and those of belief in a proposition, and that some pragmatists fail to recognize that distinction.
Bertrand Russell was especially known for his vituperative attacks on pragmatism, which he considered 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 only a disguised manifestation of idealism. (Hildebrand 2003)
Louis Menand argues[50] that during the Cold War, the intellectual life of the United States became dominated by ideologies. Since pragmatism seeks "to avoid the violence inherent in abstraction," it was not very popular at the time.
Neopragmatism as represented by 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 literary criticism than to philosophy, and which attracts the brunt of criticism from his detractors.
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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IEP Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy SEP Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Papers and online encyclopedias are part of the bibliography. Other sources may include interviews, reviews and websites.
I refer to Mr. Charles S. Peirce, with whose very existence as a philosopher I dare say many of you are unacquainted. He is one of the most original of contemporary thinkers; and the principle of practicalism or pragmatism, as he called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early 70s is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail.
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.
See also James's 1907 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture 2, fourth paragraph.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.
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....
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.
There are several peer-reviewed journals dedicated to pragmatism, for example
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