De Guzman, Davidica M.

Philman Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it has significantly influenced non-philosophersnotably in the fields of law, education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticismthis article deals with it only as a movement within philosophy. The term pragmatism was first used in print to designate a philosophical outlook about a century ago when William James (1842-1910) pressed the word into service during an 1898 address entitled Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, delivered at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously swore, however, that the term had been coined almost three decades earlier by his compatriot and friend C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). (Peirce, eager to distinguish his doctrines from the views promulgated by James, later relabeled his own position pragmaticisma name, he said, ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.) The third major figure in the classical pragmatist pantheon is John Dewey(1859-1952), whose wideranging writings had considerable impact on American intellectual life for a half-century. After Dewey, however, pragmatism lost much of its momentum. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in pragmatism, with several high-profile philosophers exploring and selectively appropriating themes and ideas embedded in the rich tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey. While the best-known and most controversial of these so-called neo-pragmatists is Richard Rorty, the following contemporary philosophers are often considered to be pragmatists: Hilary Putnam,Nicholas Rescher, Jrgen Habermas, Susan Haack, Robert Brandom, and Cornel West.

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870. Pragmatism is a rejection of the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Instead, pragmatists develop their philosophy around the idea that the function of thought is as an instrument or tool for prediction, action, and problem solving. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topicssuch as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and scienceare all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes rather than in terms of representative accuracy. A few of the various but interrelated positions often characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:

De Guzman, Davidica M. Philman

Epistemology (justification): a coherentist theory of justification that rejects the claim that all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief. Coherentists hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundationalist theories of justification. Epistemology (truth): a deflationary or pragmatist theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement while the latter is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement attribute the property of useful-to-believe to such a statement. Metaphysics: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content. Philosophy of science: an instrumentalist and scientific anti-realist view that a scientific concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality. Philosophy of language: an anti-representationalist view that rejects analyzing the semantic meaning of propositions, mental states, and statements in terms of a correspondence or representational relationship and instead analyzes semantic meaning in terms of notions like dispositions to action, inferential relationships, and/or functional roles (e.g. behaviorism andinferentialism). Not to be confused with pragmatics, a sub-field of linguistics with no relation to philosophical pragmatism. Additionally, forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verificationism, and a Quineian naturalist metaphilosophy are all commonly elements of pragmatist philosophies. Many pragmatists areepistemological relativists and see this to be an important facet of their pragmatism (e.g. Richard Rorty), but this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such relativism to be seriously misguided (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).

Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) deserves much of the credit for pragmatism, along with later twentieth century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used 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 twentieth century pragmatists along

De Guzman, Davidica M. Philman

with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. The word pragmatism derives from Greek (pragma), "a thing, a fact", which comes from (prass), "to pass over, to practise, to achieve". The word "Pragmatism" as a piece of technical terminology in philosophy refers to a specific set of associated philosophical views originating in the late twentieth-century. However, the phrase is often confused with "pragmatism" in the context of politics (which refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on practical considerations, rather than ideological notions) and with a non- technical use of "pragmatism" in ordinary contexts referring to dealing with matters in one's life realistically and in a way that is based on practical rather than abstract considerations.