Classical Pragmatism
from 1878
The meaning of an idea is the difference it makes in practice, and a belief that changes nothing whatever is not really a belief.
- Active
- from 1878
- Where
- Cambridge Massachusetts, then Chicago
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
Consider what practical effects a concept would have. Your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object. Truth is what inquiry converges on, not correspondence to something inaccessible.
What it held
Peirce formulated the maxim to clear away disputes he thought were verbal. If two competing accounts predict exactly the same experience under all conditions, there is no difference between them worth arguing about.
His account of inquiry is the deeper contribution. Belief is a habit we act on; doubt is an irritation that disrupts the habit; inquiry is the effort to get back to settled belief. Truth is what the community of inquirers would converge on in the long run — which makes it public, fallible and social rather than a private relation between a mind and a fact.
James made it famous and looser, arguing that truth is what works, and Peirce disliked the result so much he renamed his own position pragmaticism, a word he said was ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.
Dewey turned it toward education and democracy. Thinking arises when habit fails; learning is reconstruction of experience rather than transmission of content; and democracy is not just a way of choosing governments but a form of associated living in which problems get solved by the people who have them.
How it argued
Test concepts by their practical consequences; treat inquiry as a self-correcting social process rather than an individual confrontation with evidence.
What it was arguing against
Cartesian foundationalism, the correspondence theory of truth, and metaphysical disputes with no experiential difference at stake.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether truth is what works, which is James' formula and which Peirce and Dewey both regarded as a distortion. Whether the theory can distinguish useful falsehoods from truths.
Common misconceptions
That pragmatism means expedience or being unprincipled. It is a theory of meaning and inquiry, and Peirce's version is a rigorous logic — he made major contributions to formal logic and to the theory of signs.
How it began
The Metaphysical Club in Cambridge in the 1870s, a discussion group including Peirce, James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, after a civil war that had made several of them suspicious of certainty.
What became of it
Living. Eclipsed by logical positivism mid-century and revived from the 1970s by Rorty, Putnam and others.
Lasting influence
American legal realism through Holmes. Progressive education through Dewey. Contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science.
Why it still matters
Fallibilism — holding beliefs firmly while accepting any might be wrong — is the working epistemology of science, and pragmatism is where it was best articulated.
Put another way
A map judged by whether you arrive.
Where to start
James' lectures. Peirce is deeper and much harder; James makes you want to read Peirce.
The surprising bit
Peirce was dismissed from Johns Hopkins over his private life, never held another academic post, and spent his last decades in poverty writing thousands of pages that were not published for fifty years.
In their own words
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Cartesianism
The verdict
America's one original philosophical tradition, and it was made by people who mostly could not get jobs teaching it.