Pragmatic
A philosophical movement or system that emphasizes practical consequences as constituting the essential criterion in determining meaning, truth, and value.
Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870 and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his close friend and Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910). A number of others, including Peirce’s Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (who was officially allied with absolute idealism) and the more ‘critical’ John Dewey (1859-1916), were also influential.
The core of pragmatism as Peirce originally conceived it was a maxim, or rule, for clarifying concepts and hypotheses by tracing their implications for experience. This produced a distinctive epistemological outlook – a fallibilist, anti-Cartesian explication of the norms that govern inquiry. But the pragmatists of the classical period did not share a common view about what the maxim was to be applied to.
They were divided over whether pragmatism should be a scientific philosophy embracing monism about truth (following Peirce) or a broad-based alethic pluralism (following James and Dewey). The neopragmatists who emerged after the collapse of ‘classical pragmatism’, by contrast, have shared a common understanding of the maxim.
The ‘neopragmatists’ have therefore moved beyond the epistemological questions that characterize pragmatism in its classical period and now address linguistic and psychological pragmatic issues. These include the question of how to identify interesting types of utterances and the characterization of speech context features that can help to determine what proposition a sentence expresses. They have also developed a clear notion of the role that pragmatic ‘intrusion’ plays in determining what is said. This move has made it possible to define the dividing line between semantics and pragmatics, with the ‘neopragmatists’ now locating their work within far-side pragmatics.
Moreover, they are characterized by a rejection of formal logic as one ‘logical tool among many’ and a concern with the nature and role of intuition in human cognition. This is a far cry from the logical positivism that Schiller and other classical pragmatists espoused, as well as the representationalism deplored by Rorty. Yet, despite these differences with the classical pragmatists, they share a similar epistemological perspective and a commitment to an empiricism that goes well beyond mere observation or inference to experience.