Analytic & pragmatist · 1870s – today
Pragmatism
The meaning and truth of an idea lie in its practical consequences: ideas are tools for coping with experience, tested by how they work.
What difference does it make if an idea is true?
In the years after the American Civil War and Darwin’s Origin of Species, a circle in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the “Metaphysical Club” of the early 1870s) looked for a philosophy fit for a world of change, science and democratic experiment. They distrusted both Descartes’s quest for certainty and the grand metaphysical systems of the past.
If two ideas would make no difference to any possible experience or action, they do not really differ in meaning. A belief is a habit of action: inquiry starts from real doubt and ends when a belief holds up in practice. So truth is not a static copy of reality but what inquiry would settle on, or what proves itself in use.
- Meaning lies in an idea’s conceivable practical effects.
- All knowledge is fallible and open to revision.
- Inquiry and democracy are shared, experimental practices.
Through Dewey it reshaped American education, law and social science; it returned as “neopragmatism” with Rorty and Putnam, and through Hu Shi entered Chinese debates of the May Fourth era.
Thinkers
1839–1914Charles Sanders PeirceLogician and scientist who founded pragmatism and semiotics1842–1910William JamesPsychologist and philosopher who made pragmatism famous1859–1952John DeweyPhilosopher of education and democracy; lectured in China 1919–211931–2007Richard RortyNeopragmatist who challenged philosophy’s claim to mirror reality1891–1962Hu ShiMay Fourth reformer who brought pragmatism to ChinaKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofBritish empiricismPragmatism kept the empiricist rule that ideas answer to experience, but looked forward to consequences and action rather than back to sense impressions.Grew out of
Kant’s critical philosophyPeirce, a close reader of the Critique of Pure Reason, took the very word “pragmatic” from Kant.Grew out of
German IdealismDewey began as a Hegelian and kept Hegel’s sense of thought as a developing, social process, recast in Darwinian terms.
What it led to
Carried on byPost-positivist philosophy of scienceQuine ended “Two Dogmas” by calling for a “more thorough pragmatism”: we revise our web of belief by what works best.Borrowed by
Kyoto SchoolNishida took the term “pure experience” from William James and radicalised it into a starting point before subject and object.