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Pragmatism

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES In this chapter we will address the following questions: N What Is Pragmatism? N Who Are the Major Pragmatists and How Do They Differ? N How Is Pragmatism Related to American Philosophy?

Pragmatism grew out of American life and experience; it was not in the main an academic movement, and its chief expositors were marked by independence of judgment.
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Pragmatism is essentially an American philosophical movement N N N N N N N N N N that has come to prominence during the last hundred years. It has been called a new name for an old way of thinking. It strongly reects some of the characteristics of American life. Pragmatism is connected with such names as Charles S. Peirce (18391914), William James (18421910), and John Dewey (18591952). Pragmatism seeks to mediate between the empirical and idealist traditions and to combine what is most signicant in each of them. Pragmatism is an attitude, a method, and a philosophy that uses the practical consequences of ideas and beliefs as a standard for determining their value and truth. William James dened pragmatism as the attitude of looking away from rst things, principles, categories, supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.2 Pragmatism places greater emphasis on method and attitude than on a systematic philosophical doctrine. It is the method of experimental inquiry extended into all realms of human experience. Pragmatism uses the modern scientic method as the basis of a philosophy. Its afnity is with the sciences, especially the biological and social sciences, and it aims to utilize the scientic spirit and scientic knowledge to deal with all human problems, including those of ethics and religion. As a movement in philosophy, pragmatism was founded for the purpose of mediating between two opposing tendencies in nineteenthcentury thought. There was empiricism and science, to which Darwins theory of evolution had contributed the most recent description of who human beings are. This tradition looked at the world and humans as parts of a mechanical or biological process in which the mind was an observer. There was also the tradition coming from Descartes and his rationalism and moving through the critical idealism of Kant, the absolute idealism of Hegel, and later romantic thought. In this, the human mind had enormous power, so that philosophers proceeded to con290
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struct theories about the whole nature of things, ending up with a block universe. Between these two traditions there was a gulf. From the scientic point of view, rationalist and idealist philosophies lacked objective evidence to support their claims. From the rational and idealist points of view, the assumptions of science were a threat to the humanistic side and the moral and religious convictions of human beings. Pragmatism sought to mediate between these two traditions. The pragmatists said that philosophy in the past had made the mistake of looking for ultimates, absolutes, eternal essences, substances, xed principles, and metaphysical block systems. The pragmatists emphasized empirical science and the changing world and its problems, and nature as the reality beyond which we cannot go. For John Dewey, experience is central. Experience is the result of the interaction of the organism with its environment. Although the idea of experience for the pragmatists was not limited to sense experience, nonetheless they agreed with the empirical tradition that we have no conception of the whole of reality, that we know things from many perspectives, and that we must settle for a pluralistic approach to knowledge.

Charles S. Peirce (proN N N N N N N N N N nounced purse), sometimes called the founder of pragmatism, was inuenced by Kant and Hegel. Peirce considered that problems, including those of metaphysics, could be solved if one gave careful attention to the practical consequences of adherence to various ideas. Pragmatism is sometimes said to have originated in 1878, when Peirce published the article How 3 To Make Our Ideas Clear. The philosophical writings of Peirce consist of essays and manuscripts, many of which are fragmentary or incomplete. Although he never wrote a book in philosophy or organized his thoughts into systematic or nal form, his literary activity covered many years. With the publi-

Charles S. Peirce

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cation of his papers in recent decades, interest in Peirces philosophy is increasing, and he is coming to be recognized as an intellectual genius of outstanding originality. He was the rare combination of a natural scientist with a laboratory habit of mind, a careful student of philosophy, and a man with strong moral convictions. He is sometimes referred to as a philosophers philosopher, rather than a public or popular philosopher, such as James. Peirce was primarily a logician concerned with the more technical problems of logic and epistemology, and the methods of the laboratory sciences. He was interested in deductive systems, methodology in the empirical sciences, and the philosophy behind the various methods and techniques. His logic included a theory of signs and symbols, a eld in which he did pioneer work. He viewed logic as a means of communication and a cooperative or public venture. His approach was to invite critical examination and seek aid from others in a continuous quest for the clarication of ideas. Peirce wished to establish philosophy on a scientic basis and to treat theories as working hypotheses. He called his approach pragmaticism. One of Peirces main contributions to philosophy is his theory of meaning. He coined the word pragmatism from the Greek word pragma (act or deed) to emphasize the fact that words derive their meanings from actions. He set forth one of the rst modern theories of meaning by proposing a technique for the clarication of ideas. The meaning of many ideas, Peirce said, is best discovered by putting them to an experimental test and observing the results. His criterion of meaningfulness was to appeal to the way an object would behave if it had a certain character or were of a certain kind. If an object were hard it would scratch other objects; if it were volatile, it would evaporate rapidly, and the like. Peirce argued that thinking always occurs in a context, not in isolation. Meanings are derived not by intuition but by experience or experiment. For these reasons, meanings are not individual or private but are social and public. If there is no way of testing an idea by its effects or

public consequences, it is meaningless. To be able to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless is particularly important, Peirce thought, when you are considering opposing systems of thought. Peirces empiricism is intellectualistic rather than voluntaristic; that is, emphasis is on the intellect and understanding rather than on will and activity. The irritation of doubt leads to the struggle to attain belief. The end of this inquiry, which aims to dispel doubt, is knowledge. Thus he does not stress sensation or volition as much as do later forms of popular pragmatism. Peirce is critical of positivism and mechanistic determinism, on the one hand, and intuitionism and a priori principles, on the other hand. Although he shares some of the positivists views, he does not share with them the idea that empiricism requires a denial of the possibility of metaphysics. In the eld of metaphysics as well as in all other areas of discourse, we must avoid the belief that we have attained nality. Peirce supports fallibilism; even the most intelligent people are apt to be mistaken. Progressive inquiry leads to constant modication. There is chance (tychism) because, Peirce maintained, although nature behaves in a lawlike way, that regularity is never exact. Chance, as well as habit, plays a real part in the occurrence of events in the world. Fallibilism and an open future replace skepticism and absolutism, and pragmatism replaces xed systems of belief in philosophy and in science. Although Peirce gave his major attention to logic and methodology, his writings make clear that he left a place for an evolutionary idealism that stresses the need for a principle of love opposed to any narrow individualism in human affairs.

A complete discussion N N N N N N N N N N of the people who inuenced William James (see biography and excerpt, pp. 292293) would take us back to Lange, Mach, Pearson, and Renouvier, as well as to Peirce; we will have to be content with a mere mention of these names. The rapid development of pragmatism was due
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William James

William James (18421910) was born in New York City in a home where there was spirited and wide-ranging discussion that stimulated free intellectual growth. James became an original thinker; he read widely in the literature of experimental psychology and studied the works of John Stuart Mill, Kant, and Hegel. From 1855 to 1860, he studied in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. His interests shifted from painting to natural science and medicine, to psychology, and then to philosophy. From 1872 until his death, he taught at Harvard University, rst in physiology, then psychology, and nally philosophy. He wrestled with questions such as: What does it mean to be a human being? To what extent are humans free? How do ideas affect our lives? We need, James thought, to exercise a will to believe. James was a highly social person whose friends, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson, formed an inuential intellectual community. He gave public lectures, became a leader in the movement known as pragmatism, and wrote a number of books that are classics in American philosophy. His writings include The Principles of Psychology (1890); The Will to Believe (1897); The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Pragmatism (1907); The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe (1909); and, published after his death, Some Problems in Philosophy (1911); and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

largely to the fertile soil it found in America and to the brilliant exposition made by William James. In his book Pragmatism, James contrasts the tender-minded rationalist, who usually has an idealistic and optimistic outlook, with the tough-minded empiricist, the lover of facts, who is often a materialist and a pessimist. To both of these James says, I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demands. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. 4
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RADICAL EMPIRICISM

James denes the term radical empiricism this way: I say empiricism because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modication in the course of future experience.5 He says, To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.6 James includes relations, such as greater than, among the latter (directly experienced) elements.

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Excerpt from James:

The Dilemma of Determinism

[Determinism] professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts will be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one xed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.
With earths rst clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed. And the rst morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one becomes impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. W. James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays and Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1904).

Pragmatism, as we have seen, is the practice of looking toward results and facts instead of toward first principles and categories. It accepts the experiences and facts of everyday life as fundamental. Reality is just what it is experienced as beingflux or change. Because experience is fragmentary, pragmatists find things partly joined and partly disjoined, and accept them as they are. Consequently, they insist that reality is pluralistic rather than monistic or dualistic. There is the giventhe data of the senses which is brought in as stimuli from the region beyond us. Added to this is the interpretative

element, which the conscious being supplies. The creative whole of experience, which includes both the given and the interpretative element, is the one reality we know. Knowledge is thus based directly on sense perception, or experience, which constitutes the continuous, flowing stream of consciousness.
JAMES THEORY OF TRUTH

William James said, Truth happens to an idea. What was so startling about this statement was that the more traditional theories of truth took
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virtually the opposite viewnamely, that truth was a xed or static relation. When James examined the traditional theories of truth, he demanded to know what truth means in operation. Truth must be the cash value of an idea. What other motive could there be for saying that something is true or not than to provide guides for practical behavior? James would ask, What concrete difference will it make in life? A difference that makes no difference is no difference, but only a matter of words. An idea becomes true or is made true by events. An idea is true if it works or if it has satisfactory consequences. Truth is relative; it also grows. The true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is the expedient in the way of our behaving. Ideas, doctrines, and theories become instruments to help us meet life situations; doctrines are not answers to riddles. A theory is created to suit some human purpose, and the only satisfactory criterion of the truth of a theory is that it leads to benecial results. Workability, satisfactions, consequences, and results are the key words in the pragmatic conception of truth.
PRAGMATIC VIEW OF MORALITY

Within Jamess view, morality, like truth, is not xed but grows out of present life situations. The source and authority for beliefs and conduct are found in human experience. The good is that which makes for a more satisfactory life; the evil is that which tends to destroy life. James was a strong defender of moral freedom and indeterminism; he believed that determinism is an intellectualistic falsication of experience. He supported the doctrine of meliorism, which holds that the world is neither completely evil nor completely good but is capable of being improved. Human effort to improve the world is worthwhile and fruitful, and the trend of biological and social evolution is toward such improvement.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE

James devoted considerable attention to religion. The doctrines of pluralism and meliorism, as well as the doctrine of the will to believe, all
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contributed to his views of religion and of God. He acknowledged later that the will to believe might have been called the right to believe. Let us consider rst Jamess doctrine of the will to believe. We have pointed out that radical empiricism ceases to look beyond experience for supposed necessities and metaphysical entities and stresses the present stream of consciousness. Consciousness displays interest, desire, and attention; it is volitional as well as sensory, and the will rather than the intellect is determinative. The will determines how and what we experience; thus thinking is empirically secondary to willing. What is selected and emphasized is thereby made vital and real; thus, the world we experience is largely of our own making. As with our sensory perceptions, so with our ideas. Those ideas that interest us and engage our attention tend to exclude others and to dominate the scene; and these ideas tend to nd expression in our actions. In life, individuals have to make numerous decisions. How are they to make these decisions and formulate their beliefs? In some situations the evidence is reasonably certain and clear, and in these circumstances they need to act in accordance with the evidence. In other situations, in which a choice between the proposed lines of action either is not forced or is trivial, they can postpone their decisions or even refrain from choosing at all. There are still other situations, however, in which individuals facing some crucial issue must choose and act, because failure to decide will commit them to one of the alternatives. If such issues are living, forced, and momentous, people need to act even though they do not have all the evidence on the basis of which they would like to make their decisions. James doctrine of the will to believe applies to this third type of situation, where some decision is demanded by the structure of the situation. For example, shall I marry this woman (or man) or shall I wait until I know for certain how the marriage will turn out? I cannot know for certain that the marriage will be harmonious and successful. All the facts are not known and I cannot wait until all the evidence is in, yet the issue is living, forced, and momentous. To fail to act is in

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itself a decisionnot to marry this person at this time. When the will to believe leads to decision and action, it leads to discovery and conviction, or to truth and value simply through the fact that the will exists. Lifes values are empirical and are found and tested in the process of living. According to James, in many of lifes experiences, we have contact with a More. We feel that which is sympathetic and gives us support. We rely on it in worship and in prayer. This sense of the More brings comfort, happiness, and peace; furthermore, it is an almost universal experience. In the religious sense, God is the name of this ideal tendency or encompassing support in human experience. James, as we have seen, was impressed by the novelty, freedom, individuality, and diversity inherent in our world. Consequently, he insisted that God is nite. There are real possibilities for evil as well as for good in our world; no good, all-powerful God could have created the world as we know it. God is, however, moral and friendly, and we can cooperate with God in creating a better world.

to appease or conciliate the powers around us by ceremonial rites, sacrices, supplication, and so on. The second is to invent tools to control the forces of nature to our advantage. This is the way of science, industry, and the arts, and it is the way Dewey approves. The aim of philosophy is the better organization of human life and activity here and now. Interest thus shifts from traditional metaphysical problems to the methods, attitudes, and techniques for scientic and social progress. The method is that of experimental inquiry as guided by empirical research in the area of values.
EXPERIENCE AND THE CHANGING WORLD

The continued growth N N N N N N N N N N and strength of pragmatism can be attributed to John Deweys (see biography and excerpt, pp. 296297) prolic writings and his application of the principles of the movement to all phases of life and thought. Dewey achieved prominence in logic, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political, economic, and educational philosophies. For Dewey and his many followers, the term instrumentalism is preferred to the term pragmatism, but both are used. Dewey was a keen and a constant critic of the classical or traditional types of philosophies, with their search for ultimate reality and their attempt to nd the immutable. Such philosophies, Dewey claimed, attempt to minimize or transcend human experience. In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey says that we have used two methods to escape dangers and gain security. One is

John Dewey

Experience is one of the key words in Deweys pragmatic theory. Deweys philosophy is of and for daily experience. In his essay The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, Dewey sets down his criticisms of the traditional or inherited view of experience as found in empiricism and offers a substitute interpretation. The orthodox empirical view regards experience primarily as a knowledge affair (see Chapter 9). Dewey prefers to see experience as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with its social and physical environment.7 Experience for Dewey is primarily experimental and is not tied to what has been or what is given; experience involves an effort to change the given by reaching forward into the unknown. Dewey refuses to attempt to transcend human experience or to believe that anyone else has ever succeeded in doing so. In the past, philosophers attempted to discover some theoretical superexperience on the basis of which they might build a secure and meaningful life. Dewey insists that experience is not a veil that shuts man off from nature; it is the only means we have of penetrating further into the secrets of nature. This present world of men and women, of fields and factories, of plants and animals, of bustling cities and struggling nations, is the world of our experience. We should try to understand it and then attempt to construct a
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John Dewey

John Dewey (18591952) was born in Burlington, Vermont, and grew from a shy youth to a man whose inuence spread throughout the world. After his graduation from the University of Vermont, he taught classics, science, and algebra for a short time in high school and later received his Ph.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University. He taught for ten years at the University of Michigan, for a short period at the University of Minnesota, and for ten years at the University of Chicago. In 1904, he went to Columbia University and remained on the staff there until his retirement in 1930. John Dewey was a defender of the democratic process and an outspoken champion of social reform. He wanted to make philosophy relevant to the practical problems and affairs of humanity. He lectured in the United States and in a number of other countries. He was in Beijing, the capital of China, for two years lecturing and aiding in the reorganization of the educational system. He spent shorter periods in Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and Russia. After his retirement, Dewey remained active and continued to write many articles and books not only on philosophy and logic but also on art, education, science, and social and political reform. He was a leader in various humanitarian causes. A bibliography of his writings runs to more than 150 pages. Among his books are Democracy and Education (1916); Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); Experience and Nature (1925; 2nd ed., 1929); Art as Experience (1934); and Freedom and Culture (1939).

society in which all can grow in freedom and intelligence. Dewey takes evolution, relativity, and the time process seriously. The world is in the making; it is constantly moving forward. This view of the world stands in marked contrast to that of a xed and permanent reality, which dominated Greek and medieval thinking and has characterized many areas of modern science. Dewey was born in 1859, the year Darwin published Origin of Species. Not since Aristotle has any philosopher built his or her thought so completely on biological foundations. The vision of human beings as always changing and de296
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veloping in the midst of an environment that fosters and at the same time threatens their lives was decisive for Dewey. Organism and environment, development and struggle, precariousness and stabilitythese are the basic elements that humans face. Dewey put these elements together in the unifying idea of experience. According to Dewey, we live in an unnished world. Deweys attitude can best be understood by an examination of three aspects of what we call his instrumentalism. First, the notion of temporalism means that there is real movement and progress in time. We can no longer hold a spectator view of reality. Our

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Excerpt from Dewey:

The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy (1917)

A criticism of current philosophizing from the standpoint of the traditional quality of its problems must begin somewhere, and the choice of a beginning is arbitrary. It has appeared to me that the notion of experience implied in the questions most actively discussed gives a natural point of departure. For, if I mistake not, it is just the inherited view of experience common to the empirical school and its opponents which keeps alive many discussions even of matters that on their face are quite remote from it, while it is also this view which is most untenable in the light of existing science and social practice. . . . Suppose we take seriously the contribution made to our idea of experience by biology,not that recent biological science discovered the facts, but that it has so emphasized them that there is no longer an excuse for ignoring them or treating them as negligible. Any account of experience must now t into the consideration that experiencing means living; and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium, not in a vacuum. Growth and decay, health and disease, are alike continuous with activities of the natural surroundings. The difference lies in the bearing of what happens upon future life-activity. From the standpoint of this future reference environmental incidents fall into groups: those favorable to life-activities, and those hostile. J. Dewey, Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Henry Holt, 1917).

knowledge does not merely mirror the world; it reshapes and changes it. Second, the notion of futurism bids us to look mainly to the future and not to the past. The future, which is growing out of the past, will not be a repetition but will be in some sense novel. Third, meliorism is the view that the world can be made better by our efforts, a view also held by William James.
THE METHOD OF INTELLIGENCE

Basic to Deweys philosophy is the instrumental theory of ideas, the use of intelligence as a method. Thinking is biological; it is concerned

with the adjustment between an organism and its environment. All thinking and all concepts, doctrines, logics, and philosophies are, in Deweys words, part of the protective equipment of the race in its struggle for existence. Reective thinking occurs when we face a problem or when our habits are blocked in particular crises. Intelligence is an instrument for the individual or society to gain some goal. There is no separate mind stuff gifted with a faculty for thinking. Mind is manifested in our capacity to respond to what is doubtful or problematic in experience. Knowing and acting are continuous. Knowing occurs within nature, and
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sensory and rational factors cease to be competitors and are both parts of a unifying process. Ideas are plans of action. Scientic theories, like other tools and instruments, are created by us in pursuit of particular interests and goals. The aim of thinking is to remake experienced reality through the use of experimental techniques.
FREEDOM AND CULTURE

According to Deweys pragmatic outlook, humans and nature always are interdependent. We are not part body and part mind; we are naturalized within nature, and nature is so interpreted as to take account of us. Nature in humans is nature grown intelligent. Nature is neither rational nor irrational; it is intelligible and understandable. Nature is not something merely to be accepted and enjoyed; it is something to be modied and experimentally controlled. Dewey and the modern instrumentalists have been staunch defenders of freedom and democracy. Dewey was a defender of moral freedomor freedom of choiceof intellectual freedom, and of the political and civil liberties, including freedom of speech, of press, and of assembly. He advocated an extension of the democratic principles in the political and social realms to all races and classes.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Nothing is more important than education in remolding a society. If we are creatures of habit, education should provide the conditions for developing our most useful and creative habits. Instead of some catastrophic upheaval, such as a revolution, changing the habits of a culture, education can provide a more controlled approach to change. Instead of revolution, Dewey believed that those habits may be altered by education, but education of the sort that is available to every man in every walk of life. Thus he believed in universal education, which should extend over the entire culture and penetrate to its foundations. The demand that education be universal is

bound up with Deweys conviction that there is a need to nd a way to reorient society as a whole. The spirit of education should be experimental. The mind is basically a problem-solving instrument and needs to try alternative means for solving problems. However, Dewey never said that education ought simply to cater to the needs and whims of the child. In one of his earliest writings on education, The Child and the Curriculum, he criticizes the child-oriented theory of education by noting that it contains an empty concept of development. Children are expected to work things out for themselves without receiving proper guidance. According to Dewey, advocating complete freedom for the child reects a sentimental idealization of the childs naive caprices and performances and inevitably results in indulgence and spoiling.8 When unlimited free expression is allowed, children gradually tend to become listless and nally bored. Dewey argues instead for the necessity of deliberate guidance, direction, and order. Education is, or ought to be, systematic and ordered, and thus the intelligent guidance of the teacher is necessary. Dewey insisted that there be clear objectives in promoting the art of critical thinking. Though there is widespread belief that American education has suffered from Deweys inuence, it would be more accurate to say that insofar as it has failed to develop the tough-minded habits of intelligence, it has failed to be inuenced by what is most basic for Dewey.9
A COMMON FAITH

Dewey and many of his supporters reject all supernaturalism and ground both ethical and religious values solely in the natural relations of humans. The values of life are capable of verication by the methods through which other facts are established.
There exist concretely and experimentally goodsthe values of art in all its forms, of knowledge, of effort and of rest after striving,

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of education and fellowship, of friendship and love, of growth in mind and body. These goods are there and yet they are relatively embryonic. Many persons are shut out from generous participation in them; there are forces at work that threaten and sap existent goods as well as prevent their expansion. A clear and intense conception of a union of ideal ends with actual conditions is capable of arousing steady emotion.10

Dewey was critical of the traditional institutional church, with its stress on xed ritual and authoritarian dogma. He uses the adjective religious to describe those values through which ones personality is integrated and enriched. Thus any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal, because of an abiding conviction of its genuine value, is religious. The term God may be used if it refers to the unity of all ideal ends in their tendency to arouse us to desire and action.

Pragmatism has grown N N N N N N N N N N out of certain aspects of living, especially of contemporary American life. It is an expression of the mood of America, of the emphasis of modern technological society on getting things done and on satisfactory consequences. Pragmatism attempts to bring philosophy down to earth and to deal with the living issues of the day. According to Dewey, the aim of philosophy should be the improvement of human life and its environment, or the organization of life and its activities to meet human needs. We need, he says, a philosophy that makes life better here and now; the world is in the making, and our efforts will in part shape the future. If we accept the melioristic attitude and believe that life can be made better, we are more likely to create a better world. We need to face the facts of experience and to discover and live by those principles that stand the test of time and of daily living. According to pragmatism, our knowledge does not merely mirror or reect the world; thinking is a creative process that reshapes the world. Ideas and doctrines are instrumental and

Reections

serve the process of adjustment between the organism and its environment. Beliefs are developed and tested by experimental methods and experience. Pragmatism has generated a liberal habit of mind and a benecial enthusiasm for social progress. Most pragmatists have been keen supporters of democracy and human freedom. However, pragmatism has had various criticisms directed against it. Some people assert that pragmatism has an inadequate metaphysics. Pragmatists are likely to claim that speculations regarding the ultimate nature of reality misdirect our energies away from concrete problems. Pragmatists use scientic methods of inquiry and distrust traditional metaphysics, which rests on the spectator attitude toward the world. If the pragmatists stress experience and assert that reality is as it is experienced and that nature is to some extent created by people, they move in the direction of the subjective forms of idealism. However, if they stress the objective independent world, they move in the direction of realism. Another criticism is that pragmatism has an inadequate view of mind. Mind is undoubtedly a biological aid to survival, as the pragmatists claim. However, some people believe that mind is much more than an instrument for satisfying the practical needs of food, clothing, and shelter. People are problem solvers but they also function in the realm of aesthetic contemplation and of ideas and ideals. We ask about the why and not only about the how of things. Some critics think that the instrumentalist view of mind as merely a description of certain kinds of behavior is unsatisfactory. Critics also attack the pragmatic view that the discovery of truth is conditioned by human inquiry and that truth has no independent existence. Pragmatists may commit a fallacy when they say that true propositions work in the long run means that all propositions that work are true. As truth is ordinarily understood, we do not think of ourselves as creating it by living correctly; on the contrary, we live correctly by grasping and following the truth.

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Finally, critics ask whether pragmatism can be used to justify any social attitude that an individual or a group wishes to call progress. If the good is that which can be lived, is everything be-

longing to the evolutionary process good? Possibly pragmatism places too much emphasis on the goals we do seekand not enough on the goals we should seek.

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Glossary Terms
INSTRUMENTALIST (INSTRUMENTALISM)

(1) Another term for the pragmatism of John Dewey and others. (2) Instrumentalism stresses experience and interprets thinking, ideas, and beliefs as means for the adjustment of an organism to its environment. The view that the world is neither entirely good nor entirely evil but can be made better through our efforts.

PRAGMATICISM At one point of time, the name given by Peirce to his own thinking. (See pragmatism.) PRAGMATISM

MELIORISM

A philosophical outlook generated by C.S. Peirce and William James and further developed by John Dewey that emphasizes experience, experimental inquiry, and truth as that which has satisfactory consequences.

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Chapter Review
PRAGMATISM DEFINED 1. Pragmatism is an attitude, a method, and a philosophy that uses the practical consequences of ideas and beliefs as a standard for determining their value and truth. 2. Essentially an American philosophical movement, pragmatism has come to prominence in the last one hundred years. 3. Pragmatism is essentially empirical in method. However, experience for the pragmatists is not limited to sense experience. We have no conception of the whole of reality; we know things from many perspectives and we must settle for a pluralistic approach to knowledge. CHARLES S. PEIRCE 1. Peirce is often credited with founding pragmatism in 1878, when he published an early essay. 2. Concerned with logic, epistemology, and the methods of the laboratory sciences, he contributed an early modern theory of meaning to philosophy. 3. He proposed that by putting ideas to an experimental test and observing the results, we can discover their meaning. 4. Peirce supported fallibilism and tychism. WILLIAM JAMES 1. James radical empiricism broadened the base of empiricism from the laboratory to human experiences and facts of daily life. 2. James theory of truth stressed the criteria of satisfactory consequences, the difference an idea makes in life, the ideas workability. 3. He applied pragmatism to interpretations of morality; the doctrine of meliorism is important to his understanding of the world.

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4. James was convinced that the will determines how and what we experience, and that therefore thinking is empirically secondary to willing. Thus, the world we experience is largely of our own selecting, our own choices. 5. His sense of the More is central to his views on religion. James interprets God as this More. JOHN DEWEY 1. Experience is one of the key concepts in Deweys pragmatic outlook. 2. A critic of traditional philosophies that sought ultimate truths. Dewey was concerned with the better organization of human life and activity here and now. His method was experimental inquiry and guided by empirical research in the areas of values. 3. An understanding of daily experience and the construction of a better society are goals of Deweys thought. The present world and soci-

ety are evolving, and our efforts to shape its values are central human tasks. 4. Intelligence is an instrument for gaining goals. Mind is not a separate entity; the aim of thinking is to remake experienced reality through the use of experimental techniques. 5. Dewey was a defender of freedom of choice for all persons in all areas of life. 6. The spirit of education should be experimental, because the mind is basically a problem-solving instrument and therefore needs to try out alternatives. Deliberate guidance, direction, and order are necessary in education; clear objectives in promoting the art of critical thinking are central to Deweys educational philosophy. REFLECTIONS 1. American philosophy has been dominated by pragmatism. However, its critics have raised important issues for further consideration.

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Study Questions and Projects

1. Are you able to accept William James doctrine of the will to believe? What are its values and its dangers? Are there safeguards you would like to add? 2. Give an account of the life of John Dewey, emphasizing his intellectual development and the factors that inuenced his thinking. 3. Wherein does pragmatism agree with and differ from (a) idealism, (b) realism? 4. Do you think there is any justication for the charge sometimes made that pragmatism could be used to support many widely different systems of metaphysics or social philosophy? It is conceivable that several hypotheses about the same thing might work equally well? 5. Are there beliefs that cannot be veried on pragmatic grounds? Consider beliefs about the meaning of life, the worth of man, democracy, and life after death in the light of the above question. 6. What are the distinguishing features or emphases of pragmatism? 7. Indicate the part played by Charles S. Peirce in the development of pragmatism. 8. Give an exposition of the philosophy of William James, indicating his views of empiricism, truth, meliorism, and the will to believe. 9. How does the pragmatic view of truth differ from traditional interpretations? 10. Discuss the instrumentalism of John Dewey, indicating the distinctive points of emphasis in his philosophy. 11. What are the implications of accepting pragmatism, or instrumentalism, for logic, psychology, education, social philosophy, and religion? Pragmatism
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12. What do you consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of pragmatism as a general philosophy of life? 13. The index of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under Pragmatism, lists references to gures fre-

quently classied as pragmatists (for example, C. I. Lewis, G. H. Mead, Ernest Nagel). Choose one person, not discussed in this chapter, and write a short report that brings out some of the distinctive ideas stressed by him or her.

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Suggested Readings
Boydston, J. A. (ed). Guide to the Works of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. A group of scholars have collaborated to produce this valuable guide to the writings and thinking of John Dewey in a dozen different elds. Boydston, J. A. (ed.). John Dewey: The Collected Works. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 19751991. Deweys writings have been collected in thirtyseven volumes: Early Works 18821898 (5 vols.); Middle Works 18991924 (15 vols.); and Later Works 19251953 (17 vols.), with an index published in 1992. James, W. Pragmatism. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907. (Also Meridian paperback, 1965). The beginner should start with these popular essays before reading The Meaning of Truth; A Pluralistic Universe; and The Will to Believe by the same author. Morris, C. The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy. New York: Braziller, 1970. Pragmatism is seen as a unied movement of ideas in which four leading exponentsPeirce, James, Dewey, and Meadhave unique but not conicting points of emphasis. Murphy, J. P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990. A comprehensive discussion of American pragmatism which traces the development of pragmatism from Peirce through post-Quinean pragmatism. Rorty, R. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972 1980. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. The author interprets the story of philosophy from Plato to the contemporary period and suggests a new role for philosophy in contemporary culture. Smith, J. E. Americas Philosophical Vision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. The author proposes that American philosophers like Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey have forged a unique philosophical traditionone that is rich and complex enough to represent a genuine alternative to the analytic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical traditions that have originated in Britain or Europe. . Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism. London and New Haven: Hutchinson and Yale University Press, 1978. In this book, the author sets out to rescue the philosophical ideas of pragmatism from obscurity and misunderstanding. He discusses the pragmatic theory of meaning, the relationship between the nature of action and thought, and contrasts the meaning of experience to the pragmatists with the meaning of experience in empiricism. . The Spirit of American Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Using Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, and Whitehead as examples, the author says that American philosophy has its own original spirit. This spirit is found in three basic beliefs: that thinking is an activity, that ideas must make a difference, and that progress is guaranteed by the application of knowledge.

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Notes
1. J. E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 198. 2. W. James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 5455. 3. It was to this paper that James referred in his address of 1898 Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, in which he established Peirce as the founder of Pragmatism. The paper is reprinted in J. J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 34562. 4. James, Pragmatism, p. 33. 5. W. James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), p. vii. 6. W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1922), p. 42. 7. J. Dewey, Creative Intelligence (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 7. 8. J. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: University of Chicago Phoenix Books, 1902) with The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Phoenix Books, 1900), p. 15. 9. R. J. Bernstein, ed., On Experience, Nature, and Freedom: Representative Selections from John Dewey (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), p. xii. 10. J. Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 51.

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