School of thought

Pragmatism

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 1870-1950 CE
Regions
North America (origin)
Domains
Epistemology

Overview

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that broadly treats knowing the world as inseparable from acting within it. Peirce developed the pragmatic maxim to clarify concepts through their conceivable practical bearings; James adapted pragmatic ideas in his accounts of experience and truth; and Dewey made inquiry, education, democracy, and social reform central. Their disagreements about realism, truth, and inquiry prevent any single formula about practical success from defining the tradition as a whole.

Key ideas

  • Pragmatic Maxim: Peirce: to clarify an idea, consider what practical effects its object might have. 'Our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.'
  • Different Accounts of Truth: Peirce connected truth with the long-run goal of inquiry, James stressed how true ideas prove themselves within experience, and Dewey emphasized tested or warranted assertion. These views overlap but are not one theory of whatever happens to be useful.
  • Inquiry as Problem-Solving: Dewey: thinking begins with a felt difficulty. Through inquiry — observation, hypothesis, experiment — we transform indeterminate situations into resolved ones.

Key figures

Charles Sanders Peirce · William James · John Dewey

Methods used

Positions held

  • Pragmatist Theory of Truth

    James extended the pragmatic maxim into a theory of truth; it is one of the school's problem-specific positions, not the whole of Pragmatism.

    Question scope: The Nature of Truth

Influenced by

  • British Empiricism
  • Kantian Critical Philosophy

    Peirce took the very word 'pragmatic' from Kant, and his system of categories and architectonic method are deeply indebted to the critical philosophy.

  • Transcendentalism

    Took from Emerson a way of doing philosophy as cultural criticism that turns away from European philosophy's preoccupation with the foundations of knowledge, together with his stress on human power to transform circumstances.

Later connections

  • Analytic Philosophy Influenced by this tradition
  • Neo-Pragmatism Influenced by this tradition

    Rorty called Dewey one of the three most important philosophers of the century, and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature carries Dewey's attack on the spectator theory of knowledge into its case against analytic epistemology.

  • Process Philosophy Influenced by this tradition

References