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Trending: Putin: Talks with Biden Dictionary Entries Near pragmatic. praetorium pragmatic pragmatica See More Nearby Entries. Cite this Entry. com Dictionary , s. com dictionary. Copy Citation. Post the Definition of pragmatic to Facebook Facebook.

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Nevertheless, his philosophical work grew increasingly in-grown, and remained largely unappreciated by his contemporaries. The well-connected James, in contrast, regularly derived inspiration and stimulation from a motley assortment of fellow-travellers, sympathizers, and acute critics.

It should be noted, however, that Royce was also significantly influenced by Peirce. His mature works— Reconstruction in Philosophy , Experience and Nature , and The Quest for Certainty —boldly deconstruct the dualisms and dichotomies which, in one guise or another, had underwritten philosophy since the Greeks.

According to Dewey, once philosophers give up these time-honoured distinctions—between appearance and reality, theory and practice, knowledge and action, fact and value—they will see through the ill-posed problems of traditional epistemology and metaphysics.

Dewey emerged as a major figure during his decade at the University of Chicago, where fellow pragmatist G. Mead was a colleague and collaborator. After leaving Chicago for Columbia University in , Dewey became even more prolific and influential; as a result, pragmatism became an important feature of the philosophical landscape at home and abroad.

Dewey, indeed, had disciples and imitators aplenty; what he lacked was a bona fide successor—someone, that is, who could stand to Dewey as he himself stood to James and Peirce. This is not to say that pragmatists became an extinct species; C. Lewis and Sidney Hook , for instance, remained prominent and productive.

But to many it must have seemed that there was no longer much point in calling oneself a pragmatist—especially with the arrival of that self-consciously rigorous import, analytic philosophy. As American philosophers read more and more of Moore , Russell, Wittgenstein , and the Vienna Circle , many of them found the once-provocative dicta of Dewey and James infuriatingly vague and hazy.

The age of grand synoptic philosophizing was drawing rapidly to a close; the age of piecemeal problem-solving and hard-edged argument was getting underway. And so it was that Deweyans were undone by the very force that had sustained them, namely, the progressive professionalization of philosophy as a specialized academic discipline.

Of the original pragmatist triumvirate, Peirce fared the best by far; indeed, some analytic philosophers were so impressed by his technical contributions to logic and the philosophy of science that they paid him the dubious compliment of re-making him in their own image. But the reputations of James and Dewey suffered greatly and the influence of pragmatism as a faction waned.

True, W. Ramsey , Nelson Goodman , Wilfrid Sellars , and Thomas Kuhn —mainstream analytic philosophers tended to ignore pragmatism until the early s. In the absence of an Archimedean point, philosophy can only explore our practices and vocabularies from within; it can neither ground them on something external nor assess them for representational accuracy.

Post-epistemological philosophy accordingly becomes the art of understanding; it explores the ways in which those voices which constitute that mutable conversation we call our culture—the voices of science, art, morality, religion, and the like—are related.

In subsequent writings— Consequences of Pragmatism , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , Achieving Our Country , Philosophy and Social Hope , and three volumes of Philosophical Papers , , —Rorty has enthusiastically identified himself as a pragmatist; in addition, he has urged that this epithet can be usefully bestowed on a host of other well-known philosophers—notably Donald Davidson Though Rorty is the most visible and vocal contemporary champion of pragmatism, many other well-known figures have contributed significantly to the resurgence of this many-sided movement.

Prominent revivalists include Karl-Otto Apel b. There is much disagreement among these writers, however, so it would be grossly misleading to present them as manifesto-signing members of a single sect or clique. What makes these philosophers pragmatists?

There is, alas, no simple answer to this question. For there is no pragmatist creed; that is, no neat list of articles or essential tenets endorsed by all pragmatists and only by pragmatists.

Nevertheless, it is possible to identify certain ideas that have loomed large in the pragmatist tradition—though that is not to say that these ideas are the exclusive property of pragmatists, nor that they are endorsed by all pragmatists.

Pragmatism may be presented as a way of clarifying and in some cases dissolving intractable metaphysical and epistemological disputes. This maxim points to a broadly verificationist conception of linguistic meaning according to which no sense can be made of the idea that there are facts which are unknowable in principle that is, truths which no one could ever be warranted in asserting and which could have absolutely no bearing on our conduct or experience.

In a sense, then, the maxim-wielding pragmatist agrees with Oscar Wilde: only shallow people do not judge by appearances. Moreover, theories and models are to be judged primarily by their fruits and consequences, not by their origins or their relations to antecedent data or facts.

The basic idea is presented metaphorically by James and Dewey, for whom scientific theories are instruments or tools for coping with reality.

As Dewey emphasized, the utility of a theory is a matter of its problem-solving power; pragmatic coping must not be equated with what delivers emotional consolation or subjective comfort. What is essential is that theories pay their way in the long run—that they can be relied upon time and again to solve pressing problems and to clear up significant difficulties confronting inquirers.

See Section 2b below, for more on fallibilism. From Peirce and James to Rorty and Davidson, pragmatists have consistently sought to purify empiricism of vestiges of Cartesianism.

They have insisted, for instance, that empiricism divest itself of that understanding of the mental which Locke , Berkeley , and Hume inherited from Descartes. Once we accept this picture of the mind as a world unto itself, we must confront a host of knotty problems—about solipsism, skepticism, realism, and idealism—with which empiricists have long struggled.

Pace Descartes, no statement or judgment about the world is absolutely certain or incorrigible. All beliefs and theories are best treated as working hypotheses which may need to be modified—refined, revised, or rejected—in light of future inquiry and experience. Pragmatists have defended such fallibilism by means of various arguments; here are sketches of five: 1 There is an argument from the history of inquiry: even our best, most impressive theories—Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, for instance—have needed significant and unexpected revisions.

How then can we be absolutely sure we have chosen the right theory? But how could we ever know that? Fallibilism, it is said, is the only sane alternative to a cocksure dogmatism, and to the fanaticism, intolerance, and violence to which such dogmatism can all too easily lead. Pragmatists have also inveighed against the Cartesian idea that philosophy should begin with bold global doubt—that is, a doubt capable of demolishing all our old beliefs.

Peirce, James, Dewey, Quine, Popper, and Rorty, for example, have all emphatically denied that we must wipe the slate clean and find some neutral, necessary or presuppositionless starting-point for inquiry. Inquiry, pragmatists are persuaded, can start only when there is some actual or living doubt; but, they point out, we cannot genuinely doubt everything at once though they allow, as good fallibilists should, that there is nothing which we may not come to doubt in the course of our inquiries.

In sum, we must begin in media res —in the middle of things—and confess that our starting-points are contingent and historically conditioned inheritances. One meta-philosophical moral drawn by Dewey and seconded by Quine was that we should embrace naturalism: the idea that philosophy is not prior to science, but continuous with it.

There is thus no special, distinctive method on which philosophers as a caste can pride themselves; no transcendentalist faculty of pure Reason or Intuition; no Reality immutable or otherwise inaccessible to science for philosophy to ken or limn.

Moreover, philosophers do not invent or legislate standards from on high; instead, they make explicit the norms and methods implicit in our best current practice. Finally, it should be noted that pragmatists are unafraid of the Cartesian global skeptic—that is, the kind of skeptic who contends that we cannot know anything about the external world because we can never know that we are not merely dreaming.

Pragmatists typically think, for instance, that Kant was right to say that the world must be interpreted with the aid of a scheme of basic categories; but, they add, he was dead wrong to suggest that this framework is somehow sacrosanct, immutable, or necessary. Our categories and theories are indeed our creations; they reflect our peculiar constitution and history, and are not simply read off from the world.

But frameworks can change and be replaced. And just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content. Which interpretative framework or vocabulary we should use—that of physics, say, or common sense—will depend on our purposes and interests in a given context.

The upshot of all this is that the world does not impose some unique description on us; rather, it is we who choose how the world is to be described. Though this idea is powerfully present in James, it is also prominent in later pragmatism.

Then there is the matter of appealing to raw experience as a source of evidence for our beliefs. According to the tradition of mainstream empiricism from Locke to Ayer, our beliefs about the world ultimately derive their justification from perception.

Sellars, Rorty, Davidson, Putnam, and Goodman are perhaps the best-known pragmatist opponents of this foundationalist picture. More generally, pragmatists from Peirce to Rorty have been suspicious of foundationalist theories of justification according to which empirical knowledge ultimately rests on an epistemically privileged basis—that is, on a class of foundational beliefs which justify or support all other beliefs but which depend on no other beliefs for their justification.

Pragmatists resemble Kant in yet another respect: they, too, ferociously repudiate the Lockean idea that the mind resembles either a blank slate on which Nature impresses itself or a dark chamber into which the light of experience streams.

What these august metaphors seem intended to convey among other things is the idea that observation is pure reception, and that the mind is fundamentally passive in perception. Here, in other words, the knower is envisioned as a peculiar kind of voyeur: her aim is to reflect or duplicate the world without altering it—to survey or contemplate things from a practically disengaged and disinterested standpoint.

Not so, says Dewey. For Dewey, Peirce, and like-minded pragmatists, knowledge or warranted assertion is the product of inquiry, a problem-solving process by means of which we move from doubt to belief. Inquiry, however, cannot proceed effectively unless we experiment—that is, manipulate or change reality in certain ways.

Since knowledge thus grows through our attempts to push the world around and see what happens as a result , it follows that knowers as such must be agents; as a result, the ancient dualism between theory and practice must go by the board. This repudiation of the passivity of observation is a major theme in pragmatist epistemology.

According to James and Dewey, for instance, to observe is to select—to be on the lookout for something, be it for a needle in a haystack or a friendly face in a crowd.

Hence our perceptions and observations do not reflect Nature with passive impartiality; first, because observers are bound to discriminate, guided by interest, expectation, and theory; second, because we cannot observe unless we act.

But if experience is inconceivable apart from human interests and agency, then perceivers are truly explorers of the world—not mirrors superfluously reproducing it. And if acceptance of some theory or other always precedes and directs observation, we must break with the classical empiricist assumption that theories are derived from independently discovered data or facts.

Again, it is proverbial that facts are stubborn things. praetory, n. Thank you for visiting Oxford English Dictionary To continue reading, please sign in below or purchase a subscription View our subscription options.

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