Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the United States around 1870 and holds that the meaning, truth, and value of ideas are measured by their practical consequences and by their usefulness in solving problems in experience.

Its starting point is usually credited to Charles Sanders Peirce, who in 1878 formulated his pragmatic maxim: consider the conceivable practical effects of the objects of our conception, since those effects make up the whole of our conception of the object. Peirce, who sought to clarify the sense of scientific concepts, placed real doubt at the center of inquiry and rejected both deductive rationalism and purely inductive empiricism. William James popularized the name in the late nineteenth century and applied it to belief and truth, arguing that an idea is true to the extent that it works in life. John Dewey extended it to education, democracy, and the logic of inquiry, insisting that knowledge arises from the interaction between organisms and their environment.

Among the features these thinkers share are fallibilism, the view that all knowledge is provisional and open to revision; anti-foundationalism, which gives up the search for ultimate certainty; and the conviction that philosophy should engage with modern science. As a simple example, a hypothesis about how a machine works is confirmed or rejected by what happens when it is tested, not by its abstract coherence.

Today pragmatism remains active in debates about relativism, the nature of truth, and the role of science. Thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam reworked its ideas in the twentieth century, and there is no consensus on how much of pragmatism holds up as a theory of truth and how much as a method. The word is also often used in politics and everyday speech in a different sense, sometimes opposed to the philosophical one, which adds to the confusion about it.