Pragmatism
Overview
Pragmatism is the American philosophical tradition founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and developed by William James and John Dewey, with Richard Rorty as its best-known recent voice. Its central idea is that the meaning of a concept lies in its practical consequences, and that beliefs are to be assessed by how well they work as guides to action and inquiry rather than by whether they mirror a reality we can never inspect directly. Peirce's "pragmatic maxim": consider what practical effects the object of your conception might have; your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.
Notes
- My account of Knowledge is pragmatist in method and realist in commitment. Knowledge is a model built to predict and to minimise surprise, and a model is kept for exactly as long as it works. But I hold that what makes a model work is that it corresponds, well enough, to a reality that exists independently of it (True, Correspondence theory of truth). Rorty would say the second clause adds nothing; I think it is what explains the first.
- Fallibilism, which I hold without reservation, is Peirce's word and Peirce's idea.
- In ethics, the pragmatist insight that moral claims are tools for coordinating action rather than reports of moral fact is close to my own view (Moral claims are incomplete assertions).