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75-419: Within the philosophical discussions of the original club, pragmatism is said by Peirce to have been born. The name of the 1872 club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly," according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatic and positivist nature. However there is in fact no record of

150-652: 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

225-501: 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

300-449: 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

375-450: 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

450-408: 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

525-414: A club of this name in the writings of any of its members apart from Peirce, at the time or later, although Henry James mentioned in a letter that his brother had joined "a metaphysical club." Upon Peirce's arrival at Johns Hopkins University in 1879, he founded a conversation club there which was definitively named The Metaphysical Club, open to faculty members and graduate students. Amongst its members

600-436: 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

675-657: 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

750-657: 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

825-419: 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

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900-439: 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

975-440: 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

1050-402: A purpose. In point of fact it had two. One was to show that I was speaking of meaning in no other sense than that of intellectual purport. The other was to avoid all danger of being understood as attempting to explain a concept by percepts, images, schemata, or by anything but concepts. I did not, therefore, mean to say that acts, which are more strictly singular than anything, could constitute

1125-403: 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

1200-462: A sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood . The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action—a stoical axiom which, to the present writer at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty. If it be admitted, on

1275-552: 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

1350-583: 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

1425-429: 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

1500-503: 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. Pragmatic maxim The pragmatic maxim , also known as

1575-414: 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

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1650-550: 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

1725-442: 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

1800-486: 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

1875-451: 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

1950-404: 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

2025-407: 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

2100-438: 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

2175-424: 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

2250-502: 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

2325-457: 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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2400-499: 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

2475-525: 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

2550-508: 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

2625-415: Is that method of reflexion which is guided by constantly holding in view its purpose and the purpose of the ideas it analyzes, whether these ends be of the nature and uses of action or of thought. It will be seen that pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung but is a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear. This employment five times over of derivates of concipere must then have had

2700-404: 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

2775-467: 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

2850-439: Is the whole of your conception of 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

2925-580: Is the whole of your conception of the object." Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in 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

3000-476: Is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: Consider what effects, that might conceivably 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. Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows: Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive

3075-421: 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

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3150-444: The maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism , is a maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce . Serving as a normative recommendation or a regulative principle in the normative science of logic, its function is to guide the conduct of thought toward the achievement of its purpose, advising on an optimal way of "attaining clearness of apprehension ". Here is its original 1878 statement in English when it

3225-411: 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

3300-487: 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

3375-485: The 1500s, borrowed from French and derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma , meaning business, deed or act, 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

3450-441: The contrary, that action wants an end, and that that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought. The study of philosophy consists, therefore, in reflexion, and pragmatism

3525-399: 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

3600-523: The foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing 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

3675-462: 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

3750-465: 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

3825-526: 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.

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3900-405: 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)

3975-405: 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

4050-462: The nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in 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

4125-437: 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

4200-456: The objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object. I will restate this in other words, since ofttimes one can thus eliminate some unsuspected source of perplexity to the reader. This time it shall be in the indicative mood, as follows: The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all

4275-431: 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

4350-407: The possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol. To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception—and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in

4425-505: 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

4500-417: The purport, or adequate proper interpretation, of any symbol. I compared action to the finale of the symphony of thought, belief being a demicadence. Nobody conceives that the few bars at the end of a musical movement are the purpose of the movement. They may be called its upshot. But the figure obviously would not bear detailed application. I only mention it to show that the suspicion I myself expressed after

4575-508: 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

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4650-571: 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

4725-433: 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

4800-423: 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

4875-493: 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

4950-505: 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

5025-611: 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

5100-512: 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,

5175-749: Was John Dewey . The name The Metaphysial Club was adopted by Louis Menand for his 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America , covering American philosophical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century and covering the ideas and lives of many of the members of Peirce's circles in Cambridge and in Johns Hopkins. 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

5250-402: Was Wright who demanded 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

5325-419: 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

5400-440: 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

5475-534: Was not yet named: It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably 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. Peirce stated the pragmatic maxim in many different ways over the years, each of which adds its own bit of clarity or correction to their collective corpus. Pragmatism. The opinion that metaphysics

5550-404: 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

5625-623: 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

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