PRAGMATISM

school of philosophy, dominant in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century, based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of experience over fixed principles; and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings from their consequences, and their truths from their verification. Thus, ideas are essentially instruments and plans of action. The pragmatist position was first systematized by the American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910), who agreed on the practical nature of meaning but differed as to the implications of such a doctrine. For Peirce, pragmatism was primarily an investigation of the proper methods of procedure in the natural sciences, a reductive doctrine equating the meaning of theoretical terms with their impact upon experience. Peirce's is a highly theoretical view of the proper meaning of ideas, derived from Immanuel Kant and the British empiricists. By contrast, James moved in a much more practical and moralistic direction. The virtues of belief, including truth, became in his view matters of their efficiency in enabling a person to cope with the problems of living. The vital good of a belief in one's whole life became its justification. James could thus write: "On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily, in the widest sense of the word it is 'true.' " The antirational implications of this statement shocked many critics, including G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, who saw it as an invitation to wish-fulfillment and self-deception. That religious beliefs exhibit certain consoling and uplifting effects and work well in the lives of particular believers is an unarguable fact; but it is another matter entirely to assert that such attributes substantiate the beliefs themselves. Even James's fellow pragmatists, including Peirce, drew back from this identification of utility with truth. Controversies over truth continued to dog the movement. Peirce's own account of truth was "that which is fated ultimately to be agreed by all who investigate"; in this view, truth represents a kind of limit of scientifically formed opinion. But Peirce's definition failed to account for those "facts" that are inaccessible to actual investigation. The real intention of the definition is to stress the role of practically motivated inquiry in shaping concepts and judgments and the particular truths accepted on their basis. The more practical aspects of pragmatism were followed up in the works of the American philosopher and theorist of education John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey developed what he saw as a new attitude toward experience. In Dewey's view, the phenomenon of experience, which empiricists tended too often to regard as a passive, mechanistic reflection of the world, was in actuality an active, social process. Knowing, he asserted, is primarily a matter of knowing how. Inquiry tells us how to transform situations for the better; thus, knowledge is assertion warranted by inquiry. This insight was probably more influential on the practice of education than on philosophy, particularly after the logical positivists made their mark on the philosophy of science. However, specific emphasis on practice and technique regained prominence in American philosophy during the second half of the 20th century. It dominated the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who saw possession of any kind of language as mastery of a body of techniques; the famous slogan that to look for the meaning of a term one must look for its use could have been endorsed by any of the pragmatists. W.V. Quine argued that the considerations that mold changes of theory are largely pragmatic and not, for instance, dictated by previously fixed concepts and meanings that interact with raw experience. The picture of truth that emerges from Quine's works, and the works of those influenced by him, is that the truth of any individual assertion is itself secondary. It is a derivative virtue of sentences that are members of theories which themselves work, as efficient means to practical ends. Whereas the positivists hoped to reduce the content of scientific theory, this kind of instrumental view concedes to theories their own irreducible role but still sees their fundamental virtue as that of working in practice. Additional reading Classic works on Pragmatism include Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," and "What Pragmatism Is," in Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (1934); William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vol. (1890), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909); John Dewey, How We Think (1910), The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), Democracy and Education (1916), Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, 1948), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Theory of Valuation (1939), and Problems of Men (1946). On F.C.S. Schiller see R. Abel, The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller (1955), with a bibliography of Schiller's writings; on French and Italian pragmatists, H.S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, part 3 (1968), with further bibliographical references.For surveys of the movement, see H.S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (1968), with bibliography; "Pragmatism," in D.J. O'Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy, pp. 437-462 (1964); and H.S. Thayer (ed.), Pragmatism: The Classic Writings (1970), the basic writings in the Pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis, and further bibliographical references; John Dewey, "The Development of American Pragmatism," in Philosophy and Civilization, pp. 13-35 (1931); and Charles W. Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (1970). Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (1983), is an excellent discussion of his ideas.