Method
Pragmatic Inquiry
Classification
- Method family
- empirical
- Domains
- Epistemology
Overview
Pragmatic inquiry clarifies a belief through its conceivable practical consequences and tests it within a self-correcting process of experience and investigation.
Purpose. The method turns real doubt into an inquiry capable of revising habit and belief. It does not equate truth with whatever is immediately useful to one person, and it is distinct from Pragmatism as a historical movement.
Characteristic operations
- Begin from real doubt: Identify a disrupted expectation or unsettled problem that calls for inquiry.
- Trace practical bearings: Ask what experiential differences accepting the claim would make.
- Test through consequences: Compare those expectations with action, observation, and further argument.
- Revise communally: Keep the result open to correction by later inquiry and other investigators.
Used by traditions
Applied to questions
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pragmatism, §§2.1 and 4.2
- C. S. Peirce, 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), §§III–IV