222) - would be taken out of context and turned against the utterer afterwards. 200) and "the true is only the expedient" (1907, p. James especially had a penchant for the well-turned phrase, not all of whose consequences for misunderstanding he foresaw in the act of utterance, and many of his best-turned phrases - "truth's cash value" (1907, p.
The questions of meaning, reality, and truth are inextricably linked in pragmatic thinking, making what is more tersely called the pragmatic theory of truth a central topic in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, however differently each thinker may have expressed himself on the subject. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Doubt, like belief, requires justification, that is, it arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (from what Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. One famous aspect of this view is Peirce's insistence that contrary to Descartes' famous and influential method in the Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created for the purpose of conducting philosophical inquiry. What is common to all three thinkers' philosophy - and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes - is a broad emphasis on the importance of practical effects in connection with theoretical ideas as they impact on the human way of life in general and the life of inquiry in particular.
But Peirce would go on to criticize certain directions that the movement took, coining the new name pragmaticism to mark what he regarded as the original idea. The term pragmatism was first used in print by James, who attributed the main ideas of this "old way of thinking" to Peirce. Like any philosophical movement, the nature and content of pragmatism is subject to considerable debate, whether it is one of exegesis (determining what the original pragmatists thought it was) or subtantive philosophical theory (what is the most defensible theory that satisfies certain goals). These originators, however, typically point back to the influence of several earlier thinkers, with especial mention of Immanuel Kant and Alexander Bain, the latter having forged the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying that a belief is that on which a person is prepared to act. Truth itself, on this view, is not that which contributes the most good to the community, but that which contributes the most good to the individual.Īs a concerted philosophical movement, pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s, with the thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead figuring most prominently in its overall direction. For William James and many of his followers, the meaning of any term consisted, rather, in the grasping of the consequences for action that the acceptance of the truth of the term entails. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as the ultimate outcome of inquiry by a (usually) scientific community of investigators.
#PRAGMATA RULE 34 VERIFICATION#
Peirce's pragmatism, this means that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices - that is, one should be able to make predictions and test them. Instead, most of them argue that what should be taken as true is that which contributes the most good over the longest course. As a rule, however, pragmatists do not hold that anything that is practical or useful, or that anything that helps to survive merely in the short-term, should be regarded as true. For this type of pragmatist it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire meaning, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true. Some pragmatists object to the view that beliefs represent reality, and instead argue that beliefs are dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful a disposition proves in accomplishing the believer's goals. The precise character of these links to pragmata is however as diverse as the thinkers who do the pointing. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists point to some connection with practical consequences or real effects as vital components of both meaning and truth. Given the diversity among thinkers and the variety among schools of thought that have adopted this term over the years, the term pragmatism has become all but meaningless in the absence of further qualification. Pragmatism, as a school of philosophy, is a collection of many different ways of thinking. This article has been tagged since April 2006. See rationale on the talk page, or replace this tag with a more specific message. To meet The Psychology Wiki quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup.
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