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109-536: Pragmatism is a philosophical movement. Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to: 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 best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in

218-413: A phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation." Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt , and said that, 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

327-657: A "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack ) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include: 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 nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are

436-501: A 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini . Peirce regarded his own views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them about the falsity of necessitarianism and about the reality of generals and habits understood in terms of potential concrete effects even if unactualized. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used

545-679: A Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Mass., I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it "Pragmatism." In December 1877 and January 1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popular Science Monthly , and the two parts of my essay were printed in French in the Revue Philosophique , volumes vi. and vii. Of course,

654-449: A belief valid when it represents reality? "Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing". 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 James's pragmatism nothing practical or useful

763-408: A better right to testify to the morality of his attitude toward his own thoughts than I, who knew and loved him for forty-nine or fifty years. But owing to his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic — probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude — the gêne of its barbarous formulations, etc. rendered him an easy victim to Zeno and

872-425: A broader spectrum, but also, like inquiry generally, as based on actual doubts, not mere verbal doubts (such as hyperbolic doubt ), which he held to be fruitless, and it let him also frame it, by the same stroke, as requiring that proof rest on propositions free from actual doubt, rather than on ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. He outlined four methods, ordered from least to most successful in achieving

981-454: A century later, Richard Rorty in his 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

1090-408: 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

1199-493: A conception of that object's effects to a general extent of those conceived effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. Those conceivable practical implications are the conception's meaning. The meaning is the consequent form of conduct or practice that would be implied by accepting the conception as true. Peirce's pragmaticism, in the strict sense, is about the conceptual elucidation of conceptions into such meanings — about how to make our ideas clear. Making them true, in

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1308-436: 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 real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined

1417-415: A corollary, must not block the way of inquiry. What recommends the scientific method of inquiry above all others is that it is deliberately designed to arrive, eventually, at the ultimately most secure beliefs, upon which the most successful practices can eventually be based. Starting from the idea that people seek not truth per se but instead to subdue irritating, inhibitory doubt, Peirce shows how, through

1526-665: A difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds. 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", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such

1635-657: 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 does not matter, but rather provides

1744-675: A habit of overstating his intellectual debts to others such as Peirce. In another manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critic" dated by the CP editors as 1911, Peirce discussed one of Zeno's paradoxes , that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in terms of James's and others' difficulties with it. Peirce therein expressed regret at having used a "contemptuous" manner about such difficulties in his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (which James had arranged), and said of James, who had died in August 1910: "Nobody has

1853-466: A lecture entitled 'Philosophical conceptions and practical results' of which I sent you 2 (unacknowledged) copies a couple of years ago. In an article for "The Monist" for 1905, Mr. Peirce says that he "has used it continually in philosophical conversation since, perhaps, the mid-seventies." The term was publicly introduced in print by Professor William James in 1898 in an address upon "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Realities," in which authorship of

1962-419: A linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist". Pragmatic pedagogy is an educational philosophy that emphasizes teaching students knowledge that is practical for life and encourages them to grow into better people. American philosopher John Dewey is considered one of the main thinkers of the pragmatist educational approach. Neopragmatism

2071-409: A method conducive to hypotheses as well as predictions and testing, pragmatism leads beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives, namely: His approach is distinct from foundationalism , empiricist or otherwise, as well as from coherentism , by the following three dimensions: A theory that proves itself more successful than its rivals in predicting and controlling our world is said to be nearer

2180-439: A middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of

2289-495: A new deliberate method of thinking and resolving dilemmas. Peirce differed from James and the early John Dewey , in some of their tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in several senses of those terms, throughout the preponderance of his own philosophical moods. In a 1906 manuscript, Peirce wrote that, in the Metaphysical Club decades earlier, Nicholas St. John Green often urged

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2398-440: 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 context. The least famous of Schiller's main works

2507-403: A revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty , the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom . Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and

2616-426: A ruthless and Machiavellian search for mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce's pragmatic maxim 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 to test

2725-405: A secure fixation of belief: Peirce held that, in practical affairs, slow and stumbling ratiocination is often dangerously inferior to instinct and traditional sentiment, and that the scientific method is best suited to theoretical research, which in turn should not be bound to the other methods and to practical ends; reason's "first rule" is that, in order to learn, one must desire to learn and, as

2834-565: 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 (1929) 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

2943-593: A theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics . An anthology published by the MIT Press titled Pragmatic Bioethics included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from

3052-429: 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

3161-546: Is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers that 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 conceptual formation: for example, conceptual pragmatist C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey; neopragmatist Richard Rorty disliked Peirce. Pragmaticism Whether one chooses to call it " pragmatism " or "pragmaticism"—and Peirce himself

3270-414: Is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this. Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf 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

3379-554: Is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around. 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: 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. This

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3488-442: 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 are not

3597-494: Is a noun derived from the verb prassein , to do. 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. James regarded Peirce's "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. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing

3706-492: 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 , who

3815-451: 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

3924-404: 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

4033-407: 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 simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become

4142-438: 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 later called 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" and "the true

4251-424: Is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett , who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to 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 answers to questions about

4360-507: Is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities . Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make

4469-461: Is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals", 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,

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4578-499: Is only the expedient in our way of thinking" —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

4687-534: 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 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

4796-508: Is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them. During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee , whose 1997 book The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering (see designer baby ) garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of

4905-404: 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, that truth and

5014-467: 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

5123-409: Is the whole of your conception of the object (CP 5.438). In the 1909 Century Dictionary Supplement , the entry for pragmaticism by John Dewey was pragmaticism (prag-mat′i-sizm), n. [ pragmatic + ism .] A special and limited form of pragmatism, in which the pragmatism is restricted to the determining of the meaning of concepts (particularly of philosophic concepts) by consideration of

5232-421: 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

5341-411: 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 action of concrete thinking. David L. Hildebrand summarized the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project

5450-487: The "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. 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 does help in explanation. In the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there

5559-478: The Achilles. ... ", called James "about as perfect a lover of truth as it is possible for a man to be. ... " and said: "In speaking, then, of William James as I do, I am saying the most that I could of any man's intellectual morality; and with him this was but one of a whole diadem of virtues." Now, however, I have a particular occasion to write. Baldwin, arrived at J in his dictionary, suddenly calls on me to do

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5668-520: The Peirce section in Pragmatic theory of truth . Peirce's discussions and definitions of truth have influenced several epistemic truth theorists and been used as foil for deflationary and correspondence theories of truth. Peirce said that a conception's meaning consists in " all general modes of rational conduct " implied by "acceptance" of the conception—that is, if one were to accept, first of all,

5777-615: The United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Peirce, Dewey, James, Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead . The word pragmatic has existed in English since the 1500s, borrowed from French and derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma , meaning business, deed or act,

5886-401: 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." Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in

5995-561: The birth of the word " pragmaticism ."       C. S. Peirce , in The Monist, April, 1905, p. 166. Pragmatism as a philosophical movement originated in 1872 in discussions in The Metaphysical Club among Peirce, William James , Chauncey Wright , John Fiske , Francis Ellingwood Abbot , and lawyers Nicholas St. John Green and Joseph Bangs Warner (1848–1923). The first use in print of

6104-536: The birth of the word "pragmaticism", which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. Then, in a surviving draft letter to Calderoni, dated by the CP editors as circa that same year 1905, Peirce said regarding his above-quoted discussion: In the April number of the Monist I proposed that the word 'pragmatism' should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller , James , Dewey , Royce , and

6213-408: The conception as true, then what could one conceive to be consequent general modes of rational conduct by all who accept the conception as true?—the whole of such consequent general modes is the whole meaning. His pragmatism, since a conception is general, does not equate a conception's meaning, its intellectual purport, with any definite set of actual consequences or upshots corroborating or undermining

6322-469: The conception or its worth, nor does it equate its meaning, much less its truth (if it is true), with the conceived or actual benefit or cost of the conception itself, like a meme (or, say, propaganda), outside the perspective of its being true in what it purports. If it is true, its truth is not transitory but instead immutable and independent of actual trends of opinion. His pragmatism also bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes

6431-413: The contrary he had said, regarding James's and Schiller's uses of the word "pragmatism": "So far, all went happily." So it would seem that Peirce intended the coinage "pragmaticism" for two distinguishable purposes: (1) protection from literary journals and word-kidnappers, and (2) reference strictly to his own form of pragmatism, as opposed even to other pragmatisms that had not moved him to the new name. In

6540-569: The delight of the Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was incapable of definition, which would certainly seem to distinguish it from every other doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the conclusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another name; and accordingly, in April 1905, I renamed it Pragmaticism . Peirce proceeded in "A Neglected Argument" to express both deep satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists. He singled F. C. S. Schiller out by name and

6649-410: The doctrine attracted no particular attention, for, as I had remarked in my opening sentence, very few people care for logic. But in 1897 Professor James remodelled the matter, and transmogrified it into a doctrine of philosophy, some parts of which I highly approved, while other and more prominent parts I regarded, and still regard, as opposed to sound logic. About the time Professor Papini discovered, to

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6758-436: The experimental differences in the conduct of life which would conceivably result from the affirmation or denial of the meaning in question. He [the writer] framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life. . . . To serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce

6867-405: The experts — but as that which would be reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research taken far enough, such that the real does depend on that ideal final opinion—a dependence to which he appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-run validity of the rule of induction. (Peirce held that one cannot have absolute theoretical assurance of having actually reached

6976-399: The former for its a priorism , and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known. In 1868, C.S. Peirce argued that 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

7085-462: 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, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics . Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing

7194-416: 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

7303-464: The importance of applying Bain 's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. James and Peirce, inspired by crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition , agreed with Green. John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it

7412-428: The latter term in 1905. Haack's excerpt of Peirce begins below at the words "But at present ...," and continues with some ellipses. The fuller excerpt below supports her case further: [The] word "pragmatism" has gained general recognition in a generalised sense that seems to argue power of growth and vitality. The famed psychologist, James , first took it up, seeing that his "radical empiricism" substantially answered to

7521-443: The letter to Calderoni, Peirce did not reject all significant affiliation with fellow pragmatists, and instead said "the rest of us". Nor did he reject all such affiliation in later discussions. However, in the following year 1906, in a manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Peirce wrote: I have always fathered my pragmati ci sm (as I have called it since James and Schiller made the word [pragmatism] imply "the will to believe,"

7630-471: The limits of science, 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

7739-474: The manners of the British have effloresced in scolding at the word as ill-chosen, —ill-chosen, that is, to express some meaning that it was rather designed to exclude. So then, the writer, finding his bantling "pragmatism" so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce

7848-526: The mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, 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. 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.

7957-405: The movement do not often refer to them. W. V. Quine 's paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of 20th-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)

8066-405: 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 an epistemological work). James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience

8175-498: The mutability of truth, the soundness of Zeno's refutation of motion, and pluralism generally), upon Kant, Berkeley, and Leibniz. ... (Peirce proceeded to criticize J. S. Mill but acknowledged probable aid from Mill's Examination .) Then, in 1908, in his article " A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God ", mentioning both James and the journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini , Peirce wrote: In 1871, in

8284-436: The name pragmatism appears to have been in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with having coined the name during the early 1870s. James, among others, regarded Peirce's 1877-8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, especially " How to Make Our Ideas Clear " (1878) as pragmatism 's foundation. Peirce (CP 5.11-12), like James saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes, in philosophy and elsewhere, elaborated into

8393-437: The new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. 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 and, in

8502-404: The object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim . It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This 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

8611-431: The possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved. 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

8720-505: The products of extensive abstraction back onto experience." 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. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth . Pragmatists criticized

8829-542: The proper trail. James credited Peirce again the 1901-1902 Gifford Lectures that were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 444), and then in the 1906 lectures that were published in 1907 as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking , see 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

8938-514: The real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes's famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy , doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in

9047-400: The real as questions of the presuppositions of reasoning in general. To reason is to presuppose (and at least to hope), as a principle of the reasoner's self-regulation, that the truth is independent of our vagaries of opinion and is discoverable. In clearness's second grade (the "nominal" grade), he defines truth as the correspondence of a sign (in particular, a proposition) to its object, and

9156-468: The real as the object (be it a possibility or quality, or an actuality or brute fact, or a necessity or norm or law) to which a true sign corresponds, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you or I or any actual, definite community of inquirers think. After that needful but confined step, next in clearness's third grade (the pragmatic, practice-oriented grade) he defines truth — not as actual consensus, such that to inquire would be to poll

9265-404: The rest of the logic, in the utmost haste, and various questions of terminology come up. Who originated the term pragmatism , I or you? Where did it first appear in print? What do you understand by it? to which James replied (CP 8:253 footnote 8) on a post card dated November 26, 1900, Widener Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts) VB2a: You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in

9374-482: The rest of us, while the particular doctrine which I invented the word to denote, which is your first kind of pragmatism, should be called 'pragmaticism.' The extra syllable will indicate the narrower meaning. Indeed in the Monist article Peirce had said that the coinage "pragmaticism" was intended "to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition". Of course this does not mean that Peirce regarded his fellow pragmatist philosophers as word-kidnappers. To

9483-578: 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 . From a general point of view, 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) may not 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 heard. As such, pragmatism

9592-512: The sense of proving and bearing them out in fruitful practice, goes beyond that. A conception's truth is its correspondence to the real, to that which would be found by investigation taken far enough. A conception's actual confirmation (if it occurs) is neither its meaning nor its truth per se , but an actual upshot. In " How to Make Our Ideas Clear ", Peirce discusses three grades of clearness of conception: By way of example of how to clarify conceptions, he addressed conceptions about truth and

9701-433: The sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. 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

9810-420: The struggle, some can come to submit to truth, seek as truth the guidance of potential practice correctly to its given goal, and wed themselves to the scientific method. It is sometimes stated that James' and other philosophers' use of the word pragmatism so dismayed Peirce that he renamed his own variant pragmaticism . Susan Haack has disagreed, pointing out the context in which Peirce publicly introduced

9919-480: The term and of the method is credited to Mr. Peirce. 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

10028-423: 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. In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle. The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is

10137-434: The truth of putative knowledge. Peirce's pragmatism, as method and theory of definitions and the clearness of ideas , is a department within his theory of inquiry, which he variously called "Methodeutic" and "Philosophical or Speculative Rhetoric". He applied his pragmatism as a method throughout his work. Peirce called his pragmatism "the logic of abduction ", that is, the logic of inference to explanatory hypotheses. As

10246-408: The truth, and later said that the confession of inaccuracy and one-sidedness is an essential ingredient of a true abstract statement. ) Peirce argues that even to argue against the independence and discoverability of truth and the real is to presuppose that there is, about that very question under argument, a truth with just such independence and discoverability. For more on Peirce's theory of truth, see

10355-413: The truth. This is an operational notion of truth employed by scientists. In " The Fixation of Belief ", Peirce characterized inquiry in general not as the pursuit of truth per se but as the struggle to settle disturbances or conflicts of belief, irritating, inhibitory doubts, belief being that on which one is willing to act. That let Peirce frame scientific inquiry not only as a special kind of inquiry in

10464-497: 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

10573-505: 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

10682-611: The wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition. 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 used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry

10791-433: The word "pragmaticism" to distinguish his philosophical position. Pragmatism starts with the idea that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. Peirce's pragmatism is about conceptions of objects. His pragmatism is a method for fruitfully sorting out conceptual confusions caused, for example, by distinctions that make (sometimes needful) formal yet not practical differences. It equates any conception of an object with

10900-519: The work of Dewey and James. A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan's Making Morality . 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 University,

11009-410: The writer's definition of pragmatism, albeit with a certain difference in the point of view. Next, the admirably clear and brilliant thinker, Mr. Ferdinand C. S. Schiller , casting about for a more attractive name for the "anthropomorphism" of his Riddle of the Sphinx , lit, in that most remarkable paper of his on Axioms as Postulates , upon the same designation "pragmatism," which in its original sense

11118-402: Was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation." Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American philosophy. As advocated by James, John Dewey , F. C. S. Schiller , George Herbert Mead , and others, it has proved durable and popular. But Peirce did not seize on this fact to enhance his reputation, and even coined

11227-419: Was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience ( 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

11336-414: Was in generic agreement with his own doctrine, for which he has since found the more appropriate specification "humanism," while he still retains "pragmatism" in a somewhat wider sense. So far all went happily. But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. Sometimes

11445-440: Was instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized", 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

11554-477: Was not always consistent about it even after the notorious renaming—his conception of pragmatic philosophy is based on one or another version of the so-called " pragmatic maxim ". Here is one of his more emphatic statements of it: Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects

11663-404: 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 . An additional implication of this view

11772-629: 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 Schiller 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

11881-788: Was vague about which among the others he most particularly referred to. Peirce wrote "It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death. ... " There has been some controversy over Peirce's relation to other pragmatists over the years and over the question of what is owed to Peirce, with visible crests in titles such as literary essayist Edward Dahlberg 's "Cutpurse Philosopher" about James, in which Dahlberg claimed that Peirce had "tombstone reticences" about making accusations, and Kenneth Laine Ketner's and Walker Percy 's A Thief of Peirce , in which Percy described himself as "a thief of Peirce" (page 130). Meanwhile, Schiller, James's wife Alice, and James's son Henry James III believed that James had

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