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3 MODERN SCHOOLS
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In its broadest and most familiar sense,
"pragmatism" refers to the usefulness, workability, and practicality
of ideas, policies, and proposals as criteria of their merit and claims to
attention. Achieving results, "getting things done" in business and
public affairs is often said to be "pragmatic." There is a harsher and
more brutal connotation of the term in which any exercise of power in the
successful pursuit of practical and specific objectives is called
"pragmatic." The character of American business and politics is often
so described. In these cases "pragmatic" carries the stamp of
justification: a policy is justified pragmatically if it is successful. The
familiar and the academic conceptions have in common an opposition to invoking
the authority of precedents or of abstract and ultimate principles. Thus in law,
judicial decisions that have turned on the weighing of consequences and probable
general welfare rather than on being deduced from precedents have been called
pragmatic. |
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The word pragmatism goes back to the Greek      ("action," "affair").
The Greek historian Polybius
(died 118 BC) called his writings "pragmatic," meaning thereby that they were
intended to be instructive and useful to his readers. In his introduction to the Philosophy
of History, Hegel
commented on this "pragmatical" approach as the second kind of reflective
history, and for this genre he cited Johannes von M?ler's History of the World (Eng.
trans. 1840). As the psychologist and leading Pragmatist William James remarked,
"the term is derived from the same Greek word meaning action, from which our words
'practice' and 'practical' come." Charles Peirce, another
pioneering Pragmatist, who may have been the first to use the word to designate a specific
philosophic doctrine, had Kant's German term rather than the Greek word in mind: Pragmatisch
refers to experimental, empirical, and purposive thought "based on and applying
to experience." In the philosophy of education the notion that children learn by
doing, that critical standards of procedure and understanding emerge from the application
of concepts to directly experienced subject matters, has been called
"pragmatic." In semiotics, the general theory of language, that part that
studies the relation of the user to the words or other signs that he uses is called pragmatics (as
distinct from semantics and syntax).
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During the first quarter of the 20th
century, Pragmatism was the most influential philosophy in America, exerting an
impact on the study of law, education, political and social theory, art, and
religion. Six fundamental theses of this philosophy can be distinguished. It is,
however, unlikely that any one thinker would have subscribed to them all; and
even on points of agreement, varying interpretations mark the thought and temper
of the major Pragmatists. The six theses are: |
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1. Responsive to Idealism
and evolutionary theory, Pragmatists have emphasized the "plastic"
nature of reality and the practical function of
knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it. Existence
is fundamentally concerned with action, which some Pragmatists exalted to an
almost metaphysical level. Change being an inevitable condition of life,
Pragmatists have called attention to the ways in which change can be directed
for individual and social benefit. They have consequently been most critical of
moral and metaphysical doctrines in which change and action are relegated to the
"merely practical," on the lowest level of the hierarchy of values.
Some Pragmatists anticipated the more concrete and life-centred philosophy of Existentialism
by arguing that only in acting--confronted with obstacles, compelled to make
choices, and concerned to give form to experience--is man's being realized and
discovered. |
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2. Pragmatism is a continuation of
critical Empiricism in emphasizing the priority
of actual experience over fixed principles and a
priori reasoning in critical investigation. For James this meant that the
Pragmatist (see also a
priori knowledge) |
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turns away from abstraction and
insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and
pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy,
towards facts, towards action . . . . It means the open air and possibilities of
nature, as against . . . dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in
truth. |
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3. The pragmatic meaning
of an idea, belief, or proposition is said to reside in the distinct class of
specific experimental or practical consequences that result from the use,
application, or entertainment of the notion. As Peirce commented: "Our idea
of anything is our idea of its sensible effects." Two propositions for
which no different effects can be discerned have merely a verbal appearance of
dissimilarity, and a proposition for which no definite theoretical or practical
consequences can be determined is pragmatically meaningless. For Pragmatists
"there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a
possible difference of practice." Meaning thus has a predictive component,
and some Pragmatists came close to identifying the meaning of a term or
proposition with the process of its verification. |
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4. While most philosophers have defined
truth in terms of a belief's "coherence" within a pattern of other
beliefs or as the "correspondence" between a proposition and an actual
state of affairs, Pragmatism has, in contrast, generally held that truth,
like meaning, is to be found in the process of verification. Thus truth is
the verification of a proposition, or the successful working of an idea.
Crudely, truth is "what works." Less crudely and more theoretically,
truth is in Peirce's words, the "limit towards which endless investigation
would tend to bring scientific belief." For John
Dewey, founder of the "Instrumentalist" school of Pragmatism,
these are beliefs "warranted" by inquiry. (see also coherence theory of truth) |
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5. In keeping with their understanding
of meaning and truth, Pragmatists have interpreted ideas as instruments and
plans of action. In contrast to the conception of ideas as images and copies of
impressions or of external objects, Pragmatist theories have emphasized the
functional character of ideas: ideas are suggestions and anticipations of
possible conduct; they are hypotheses or forecasts of what will result from a
given action; they are ways of organizing behaviour in the world rather than
replicas of the world. Ideas are thus analogous in some respects to tools; they
are efficient, useful, and valuable, or not, depending on the role that they
play in contributing to the successful direction of behaviour. |
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6. In methodology,
Pragmatism is a broad philosophical attitude toward the formation of concepts,
hypotheses, and theories and their justification. To Pragmatists man's
interpretations of reality are motivated and justified by considerations of
efficacy and utility in serving his interests and needs; the molding of language
and theorizing are likewise subject to the critical objective of maximum
usefulness according to man's various purposes. |
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Pragmatism was a part of a general
revolt against the overly intellectual, somewhat fastidious, and closed systems
of Idealism in 19th-century philosophy. These boldly speculative Idealists had
expanded man's subjective experience of mind till it became a metaphysical
principle of cosmic explanation. To the Idealist, all of reality was one fabric,
woven from parts that cohered by virtue of the internal relations that they bore
to one another; and this reality was often interpreted in abstract and fixed
intellectual categories. The theory of evolution, then still new, seemed to the
Pragmatists, on the other hand, to call for a new, non-Idealist interpretation
of nature, life, and reason--one that challenged the long-established
conceptions of fixed species. The new emphasis was on the particular variations
and struggles of life in adapting to the environment. Philosophically, the fact
of growth and the development of techniques for instituting changes favourable
to life became the significant factors rather than the Idealist's ambitious
rationalistic account of human goals and of the universe in general, and
important developments in natural science and logic also encouraged a critical
attitude toward earlier systems. |
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There were two main influences on the
early formation of Pragmatism: One was the tradition of British Empiricism in
the work of John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and John Venn, which had stressed
the role of experience in the genesis of knowledge--and particularly their
analyses of belief as being intimately tied in with action and, indeed, as
definable in terms of one's disposition and motive to act. The work of George
Berkeley, an important 18th-century empirical Idealist, which presented a
theory of the practical and inferential nature of knowledge, of sensations as
signs (and thus predictive) of future experience, led Peirce to refer to him as
"the introducer of Pragmatism." The other major influence came from
modern German philosophy: from Kant's analysis
of the purposive character of belief and of the roles of will and desire in
forming belief and his doctrine of "regulative ideas," such as God or
the Soul, which guide the understanding in achieving systematic completeness and
unity of knowledge; from Romantic Idealists, for whom all reason is
"practical" in expanding and enriching human experience; and from
Hegel's historical and social conception of changing and developing subject
matters. In sum, Peirce was profoundly impressed by Kant and by the Scottish
philosophy of common sense, James by British Empiricism and by the voluntarisms
(stressing the role of choice or will) of the genetic epistemologist James Ward
and the relativistic French Personalist Charles Renouvier, Dewey by Coleridge's
version of Kant's active conception of mind and by neo-Kantian and Hegelian
Idealism. |
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Finally, to these influences must be
added that of American social experience in the 19th century: the rapid
expansion of industry and trade and a popular optimism, with its roots in
Puritan theology, holding that hard work and virtue are bound to be rewarded.
Both the precariousness of frontier life, however, and the rapidly expanding
economy weakened the prevailing Calvinistic belief in a predestined future and
encouraged the emergence of inventiveness, a sense of living still in the New
World experiment, and adoption of the ideal of "making good." |
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It was in the critical group discussions
of the "Metaphysical Club" in the 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
that Pragmatism first received philosophic expression. In addition to Peirce and
James, membership in the club included Chauncey Wright, F.E. Abbot, and Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A version of Peirce's now classic paper "The
Fixation of Belief" (November 1877) seems to have been presented at the
club. But James also published a paper in 1878, "Spencer's Definition of
Mind as Correspondence," in which his Pragmatism and analysis of thought
and belief are clearly discernible. It was in a lecture delivered 20 years
later, however, that James introduced Pragmatism, then fully crediting the idea
to Peirce. It was primarily James's exposition that became famous and was
received by the world at large. |
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The Pragmatic philosophy of Charles
Sanders Peirce was part of a more general theory of thought
and of signs. Thought, or "inquiry," it was held, results from doubt,
a state in which habitual actions are blocked or confused and from which organic
irritation and irresolution result. Resolution, unobstructed conduct, on the
other hand, are products of belief, which is a form of stability and
satisfaction. It is the function of scientific thought to produce true beliefs.
In a prolonged effort to embed this analysis of doubt and inquiry within a more
comprehensive theory of signs in which communication, thought, knowledge, and
intelligent conduct could be fully understood, Peirce achieved a wealth of
original insights. A sign is a socially standardized way by which something (a
thought, word, object) refers man (the community of sign users) to something
else (the interpretant), which, in turn, is itself another sign. Peirce's
Pragmatism is thus a method for translating certain kinds of signs into clearer
signs in order to surmount linguistic or conceptual confusion. Getting at the
interpretant involves determining the "effects" or consequences of the
signs or ideas in question. |
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Peirce's Pragmatism is therefore
primarily a theory of meaning that emerged from
his first-hand reflections on his own scientific work, in which the
experimentalist understands a proposition as meaning that, if a prescribed
experiment is performed, a stated experience will result. The method has two
different uses: |
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(1) It is a way of showing that when
disputes permit no resolution, the difficulties are due to misuses of language,
to subtle conceptual confusions. Such questions as whether the physical world is
an illusion, whether man's senses always mislead him, or whether his actions are
fated are "not real problems." |
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(2) The method may be employed for
clarification. As Peirce wrote: |
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Consider what effects, that might
conceiveably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of
the object. |
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To say, for example, that an object O
is hard means that if the operation of scratching O
is performed, O will not be
scratched by most substances. One thus achieves clarity when one can supply a
conditional statement of this kind. |
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Similarly, in his theory of truth, one
means by truth of belief that if a certain operation is the subject of
continuous scientific inquiry by the community of investigators, assent to the
belief would increase and dissent decrease "in the long run."
Consequently, not only is thought purposive but meaning carries a reference to
the future. Peirce's concept of the community of sign users and inquirers also
has social and moral relevance, for it is nothing less than the ideal of
rational democracy. |
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Witnessing his doctrine undergo a medley
of dubious interpretations, Peirce eventually dissociated himself from these by
calling his own view "Pragmaticism," a term he called so ugly as to be
safe from uninformed use. Parts of the work of Dewey, of the social Pragmatist
G.H. Mead, and of the conceptualistic Pragmatist C.I. Lewis are a further
development of the logical Pragmatism of Peirce. The English logician F.P.
Ramsey and the Italians Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni also undertook
significant extensions of Peirce's Pragmatism. |
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An alternative, though not wholly
different, version of Pragmatism was developed by William James. It took a
psychological and moral form largely unforeseen and unintended by Peirce. |
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A basic difference between Peirce and
James is discernible in their respective conceptions of the direction to be
taken by Pragmatic analysis. While Peirce construed meaning in general,
conditional schema, and interpretants, James focussed upon the distinct
contributions that ideas and beliefs make to specific forms of human experience
on the living level of practical wants and purposes. Between the two close
friends there persisted a fundamental philosophical difference in outlook that
affected even their styles. While James was a Nominalist, holding that the full
significance of ideas, meanings, and actions lies in their particular concrete
existent occurrence, Peirce--as a scholastic Realist--sharply criticized him at
this point, arguing that "a thing in general is as real as in the
concrete." |
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The most conspicuous feature of James's
writings on Pragmatism is the dominant place given to considerations of value,
worth, and satisfaction--consequences of his teleological (purposive) conception
of mind (cf. his Principles
of Psychology). James maintained that thought is adaptive and
purposive but also suffused with ideal emotional and practical
interests--"should-be's"--which, as conditions of action, work to
transform the world and create the future, even to "make the truth which
they declare." Consequently, truth and meaning are species of value: "The
true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief." |
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James took meaning to be an intimate
part of the use of ideas for expediting action. The notion of the difference
that a proposition makes in experience was fundamental in James's Pragmatic
methodology. He remarked that "it is a good rule in physiology, when we are
studying the meaning of an organ," to look to the specific function that it
performs. In like manner, the special difference that the presence of mind makes
in observable cases, reflected in its unique functioning, defines the use of
"mind"; "In particular, the pursuance of future ends and the
choice of means . . . are thus the mark
and criterion of the presence of mentality." |
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With his training in medicine and
psychology and the influence of Darwin in the background, James considered that
the main function of thought is to help us establish "satisfactory
relations with our surroundings." Thus man helps to mold the character of
reality according to his needs and desires. Indeed, this is fundamental in
James's defense of the right to believe in his famous essay "The Will to
Believe" (1897). James argued that we may have a reasonable right to hold a
religious or metaphysical belief (e.g., that
there is a perfect, eternal, and personal aspect of the universe) when the
belief in question would supply a vital psychological and moral benefit to the
believer, when evidence for and against the belief is equal, and when the
decision to believe is forced and momentous. In James's functional conception of
truth, the "working," and hence the truth, of ideas is their role in
opening up valuable possible directions of thought and action--"a leading
that is worth while." (see also "Will to Believe and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy, The") |
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James's "working" view of
truth and of a reality that man in part makes by acting out and realizing ideas,
and especially his essay "The Will to Believe," were enthusiastically
received by F.C.S. Schiller in England and by
Giovanni Papini in Italy, and these doctrines became a cause célèbre
for Pragmatists and their critics. |
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An admirer and friend of James,
Schiller, now nearly forgotten, was once the most famous Pragmatist in England
and Europe. Schiller was initially a humanist in the sense that, for him, both
reality and knowledge are reflections of human activity--"the taken"
rather than "the given." He first came to appreciate James's
"The Will to Believe" in 1897 and subsequently acknowledged its impact
on his thinking in an early and important paper, "Axioms As
Postulates" (1902). He was a tireless critic of the "closed"
systems of Idealism of F.H. Bradley, J.M.E. McTaggart, and Bernard Bosanquet and
an advocate of the intellectual freedom that consists in "open,"
plural, changing, and to some extent never finished philosophical theorizing.
According to Schiller, reality and truth are "man-made" rather than
eternal verities. The true and the false are basically forms of good and bad and
are relative to the private purposes of some particular person. He attempted to
describe and analyze the "logic" of the experimental
"trying" through which such needs are satisfied. For Schiller, reality
is wholly plastic; and, starting out from initial postulates, one proceeds to
construct one's schemes for achieving a satisfactory outcome of desire, finally
rendering one's unformed possibilities (hyle)
into a common world of language and action. On this view, all of science derives
from and is inescapably guided by the psychological process of human thought;
man is the measure of all things. |
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John Dewey once noted that "Peirce
wrote as a logician and James as a humanist." This distinction
characterizes not only the course of Pragmatism but also the shaping of Dewey's
own thought. Dewey first felt the influence of James in the 1890s, during the
period in which he was struggling to free himself from the hold of Hegelian
Idealism. Later, he recognized the value of Peirce's work, which clearly
prefigured certain ideas that he had developed independently. |
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With indefatigable effort and care Dewey
reformulated Pragmatism, critically readjusting some of its conflicting
doctrines, drawing upon his own work in psychology and education, and finding
stimulation in the social Pragmatism of his friend George Herbert Mead. The
resulting construction was Instrumentalism,
which Dewey conceived as a single coherent theory embracing both the logical and
humanistic currents of Pragmatism and thus integrating the methods and
conclusions of scientific knowledge with beliefs about values and purposes. |
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While scientific, moral, and social
experiences may differ in subject matter, the method of thought functioning
"in the experimental determinations of future consequences" remains
the same for all inquiry. Initially provoked by doubtful or problematic
conditions, intelligent conduct is addressed to a resolution and settling of
these conditions and to a "warranted assertion"--Dewey's version of
"truth." Such is the "mediative function" of reason.
"Truth" is thus identified with the outcome of competent inquiry.
Actions occurring on the organic level, if they be at first confused and
obstructed, can then become organized, coherent, and liberated through such
inquiry. |
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Dewey's analysis of the organic,
cultural, and formal conditions of intelligent action implies that all
reflective conduct issues in an evaluation of a situation with respect to future
action and consequences: thus inquiry is essentially an evaluative procedure.
This method, most impressively applied in the sciences, is nonetheless a
paradigm of moral activity as well. In ethics, "the action needed to
satisfy" the situation is not to be found simply by the application of
moral codes. The meaning |
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has to be searched for [since] there
are conflicting desires and alternative apparent goods . . . . Hence inquiry is
exacted . . . . The good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and
attained on the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified. |
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In general, for Instrumentalism, moral
ideals and "ends" function as means and hypotheses in guiding the
deliberative process directed to controlling experience and attaining future
goods. |
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Not health as an end fixed once for
all, but the needed improvement in health--a continual process--is the end and
good . . . . Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of
perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living . . . . Growth itself is the
only moral 'end.' |
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Inquiry possessed a genuine religious
significance for Dewey, and in its functioning
as a critical, self-corrective social process of human growth he envisaged the
working ethic of democracy. |
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Two important contributions to American
Pragmatism, which have not yet received the attention that they deserve, came
from Mead and Lewis. |
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Mead's
orientation was social psychology. He had studied physiological psychology in
Germany, had earlier worked under James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, and was
also familiar with Peirce's analyses of thought and signs. Dewey regarded him as
one of the most fertile minds in American philosophy. |
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Mead developed the most comprehensive of
the Pragmatist theories of mind. He depicted the
evolution of mind and self-consciousness as emerging from social interactions
and the use of gestures and "significant symbols" such as words. In
contrast to other creatures, an individual regarded as having mind, engaging
with others in social acts, can respond to his own gestures as others respond to
them--thus taking on social roles and becoming an "other" in respect
to himself. It is therefore by means of language, the use of "significant
symbols," that mind emerges. |
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Fundamental to Mead's philosophy is his
conception of the social act, in which individuals modify and direct one
anothers' activities, work out their purposes, and accordingly transform their
environments. In the social act the future controls present conduct, and this is
distinctive of consciousness. Since the function of intelligence is to render
the world "favourable for conduct," Mead viewed the development of
scientific knowledge and the evolutionary process as coinciding. |
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Lewis's theory of "conceptualistic
Pragmatism" was derived partly from his study of modern logic and partly
from the influence of Royce and the classic Pragmatists. The critical results of
a careful study of Kant are traceable in his work. |
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Lewis's
Pragmatism focusses upon concepts, categories, and principles through which
experience is interpreted. Though the sensuously given is
"unalterable," how it is taken, how conceptually interpreted, depends
on the purposes and initiatives of the mind--the a priori element in knowledge,
which, functioning as categorical criteria of reality, is "true no matter
what." It is by means of these that a systematic interpretation of reality
is developed. However, |
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there may be alternative conceptual
systems, giving rise to alternative descriptions of experience, which are
equally objective and equally valid . . . . When this is so, choice will be
determined . . . on pragmatic grounds. |
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In stressing the purposive character of
conceptualization, Lewis is thus in the main course of American Pragmatism. |
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In his preface to Pragmatism, James commented that the Pragmatic movement was the
focal expression of a number of philosophic tendencies suddenly becoming
conscious of themselves and of "their combined mission." He mentioned
the French thinkers Maurice Blondel, Édouard
Le Roy, and B. de Sailly and the Italian
Giovanni Papini. Blondel was the author of L'Action
(1893) and spokesman for a voluntaristic and activistic theory of knowledge.
He was a founder of the "school of action," a liberal Catholic group
that was part of the modernist movement (which employed the new
historico-critical approach to the Bible and promoted a rationalistic
interpretation of the faith). As early as 1888, Blondel appropriated the term Pragmatisme,
only to abandon it when he learned of American Pragmatism, which was a more
naturalistic philosophy than his own. Le Roy, closer to James than other French
thinkers, also called his views Pragmatism. In broad respects he was like James
in holding that the truth and the full significance of beliefs is found in
acting them out. Le Roy was a disciple of Henri Poincaré,
who had argued that scientific theories are not mere summaries of data, nor
deduced from axioms, but are creative constructions, products of human thought
and ingenuity, "conventions." To the question of what limits are
imposed on otherwise arbitrary conventions, of what justifies them, Le Roy
suggested their convenience in use. James saw similar forms of Pragmatism in
Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, Pierre Duhem, and Théodore Ruyssen in
"the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality" and
that "their great use is to summarize old facts and lead to new ones"
so that they are a "man-made language, a conceptual shorthand . . . in
which we write our reports of nature." |
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Another French thinker, Georges
Sorel, undertook to reformulate James's Pragmatism into a
"useful" doctrine of social criticism. Mussolini later cited Sorel and
James as two of his philosophic mentors. He claimed to find in James "that
faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight, to which Fascism owes a
great part of its success." To the democratic James, no lesson could have
been more badly learned. |
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A more immediate and direct form of
James's Pragmatism occurred in Italy with its centre in the journal Leonardo,
under the leadership of the iconoclastic critic Giovanni
Papini. James referred to Papini as "a brilliant, humorous and witty
writer." He called him a genius and was addressed in turn by him as
"the Master." Papini's Pragmatism, derived from James's "The Will
to Believe," became a theory of the will to action. In action, through
creative power and passion, man achieves a kind of divinity. This romantic
exaltation of action was appealing to artists but also to fanatics. Papini and
his associate Giuseppe Prezzolini comprised the "magical" school of
Pragmatism (in the sense of seeking "divinely-creative" power) in
contrast to the "logical" school inspired by Peirce of G. Vailati and
M. Calderoni. |
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Certain extensions and applications of
Pragmatism are to be found in current American philosophy. Sidney
Hook has directed some of the critical techniques of analysis against a
number of ideologies. In the tradition of the scientifically oriented
Pragmatisms of Peirce and Dewey, he has explored the relation between the logic
of experimental inquiry and the ethic of democracy. A converging of Pragmatism
and Logical Positivism resulted in the movement
of "logical empiricism" which, in addition to Dewey and Lewis,
included the top-rank philosophers of science P.W. Bridgman, Rudolf Carnap, and
Ernest Nagel, and the philosophical semanticist Charles W. Morris, all of whom
were responsive to the Pragmatisms of Peirce, James, and Dewey. More recent and
detailed studies of the structure of science, the nature of theories and
explanation, by Carnap, Lewis, and Nagel, and a new interest in Instrumentalism
deriving from the work of F.P. Ramsey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.H. Watson, and
Gilbert Ryle (as well, of course, as from Dewey) exhibit a further continuation
of Pragmatism. |
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Maintaining a "more thorough
Pragmatism" than that of Carnap and Lewis, who viewed choices made within
scientific frameworks as pragmatic decisions, the prominent logician W.V.
Quine has argued against the alleged boundary between analytic and
synthetic truths. No portion of the conceptual scheme of science is exempt (as
analytic truths were supposed to be) from possible revision in the flux of
experience and in the light of pragmatic interests in efficacy and comprehension
in predicting future experience. In important respects Quine's view of the
evolution, organization, and function of the conceptual structure of science is
close to that of Schiller, James, and Dewey. (see also analytic
proposition ) |
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Quine has also defended a methodological
Pragmatism and relativism on ontological questions on the nature of being or
reality. This position, also taken by another contemporary philosopher of
science and language, Nelson Goodman, recalls
the earlier Pragmatists' notion of the "plastic" character of reality,
now seen as conceptually plastic in the sense of being expressible in a variety
of systems of symbols and languages. It is conceptually misguided to seek the
nature of objects, since what there is
is not describable in abstracto from
the particular language in which an ontological question has been put. Objects
declared to be real, be they classes, numbers, atoms, or stones, may differ
widely. But differences between the "theoretical" and the
"factual" entities are basically differences of degree and purpose in
evolving conceptualization. Hence reality is anything that it is truly said to
be--in any of many linguistic and symbolic systems; and where differences in
ways of speaking about objects call for choices, the ensuing adjudications will
be pragmatic. |
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Pragmatism has been vulnerable to
certain criticisms. It has often been portrayed as a rationalization of the
American business ethos--a portraiture perhaps inspired, but not by any scrutiny
of the writings of the philosophers themselves. Similarly, the Pragmatic theory
of truth has been assailed. Concerning an idea or belief, James had held that
one can say: " 'It is useful because it is true' or that 'it is true
because it is useful.' " "Both phrases," he added, "mean the
same thing." Most scholars, however, have denied this equivalence. His
position may seem, moreover, to allow for an idea to be true (i.e., useful or expedient) for one person and false (inexpedient)
for others. Finally, James was accused of reducing truth to a subjective play of
opinions that one happens to relish or find useful to believe. To these charges
James replied that "what immediately feels most 'good' is not always most
'true' when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience." He also
warned: "Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which
realities follow in his experience." |
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As a single movement, Pragmatism is no
longer extant; but as a body of ideas it contributes a heritage that is destined
for future analysis and development. Chief among these are the interpretation of
thought and meaning as forms of purposive behaviour, of knowledge as evaluative
procedure in which normative and descriptive materials are integrally related,
and of the logic of scientific inquiry as a norm of intelligent conduct in the
affairs of men. Finally, Pragmatism has succeeded in its critical reaction to
the 19th-century philosophy from which it emerged. It has influenced the current
conception of philosophy as a critical method of investigating problems and
clarifying communication rather than as a universal synthesis of knowledge.
Pragmatism thus has certain affinities with the critical philosophizing of G.E.
Moore and Bertrand Russell, as well as with the thought of the French
intuitionist and vitalist Henri Bergson and his disciple Édouard Le Roy,
of Blondel, of the early Positivists Mach and Duhem, of the fictionalist Hans
Vaihinger, of the Vienna Circle and the philosopher of logic and language Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and also of the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and some
of the continuing forms of Phenomenology and Existentialism. It has recognized
the relative, contingent, and fallible (yet still authentic) character of human
reason, rather than perpetuating the dubious ideal of philosophy as a system of
eternal truths. In so doing, and in thus altering the philosophical scene,
Pragmatism has become vitally implicated in the practices of current
intellectual life; and in the light of this fact, a more pragmatic justification
of Pragmatism is difficult to imagine. (H.S.T.) |
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