Pragmatist

A useful general account of pragmatism's origins during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Menand's The Metaphysical Club. According to Menand, pragmatism took form largely in response to the work of Charles Darwin (evolution, ongoing process, and a non-epistemological view of history), statistics (the recognition of the role of randomness in the unfolding of events, and of the presence of regularity within randomness), American democracy (values of pluralism and consensus applied to knowledge as well as politics), and in particular the American Civil War (a rejection of the sort of absolutizing or dualizing claims (i.e., to Truth) that provide the philosophical underpinnings of war).

Some pragmatists and related thinkers:

• Immanuel Kant (for the category of "practical knowledge")
• Charles Sanders Peirce (note: pronounced "SAWN-ders PURSE": coined the term, though because he was so widely hated and seldom read, was not a prominent figure during his lifetime; he eventually distinguished his own philosophy from James's by calling it "pragmaticism." Peirce also invented semiotics)
• William James (influential psychologist and theorist of religion, as well as philosopher. First to be widely recognized for the term, though he would have preferred "humanist")
• John Dewey (American philosopher, key thinker in philosophy of education, referred to his own philosophy as "instrumentalism")
• George Herbert Mead (philosopher and social psychologist)
• Willard van Orman Quine (pragmatist philospher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics)
• Wilfrid Sellars (broad thinker, attacked foundationalism in the analytic tradition)
• Richard Rorty (controversial neo-pragmatist)
• Cornel West (important thinker on race, politics, and religion; operates under the sign of "prophetic pragmatism")

More on Jamesian Pragmatism

In William James' view, pragmatism is in the first instance a theory of meaning. He asked us to imagine a man on a camping trip trying to catch a glimpse of a squirrel on the opposite side of a tree. The squirrel is clinging to the trunk, belly against the wood, so that he and the man are directly facing one another, although the tree itself keeps either from seein the other. As the man moves around the tree to try to see the critter, it moves correspondingly, keeping the tree between them.

James asked us to imagine, further, that an argument breaks out within the camping party, whether the man was "going around" the squirrel or not. One faction contends that he was not -- the man and squirrel were face-to-face the whole time, so neither went around the other. To another faction, this seems absurd! -- the man went around the tree, the squirrel was on the tree, so the man necessarily went around the squirrel!

The point of the story was that, in the end, the campers realized they were simply confused by an ambiguity in the phrase "to go around." This ambiguity can be resolved by tracing the "practical consequences" of going around. Do we mean being to the north, east, south, and west of some central object? Then the man went around the squirrel. Do we mean being in front, to the side, in back, and to the other side of that central object? Then the man failed to go around the squirrel. Likewise with such notions as freedom or fate, materialism, pluralism, monism -- we must trace practical consequences to know what we mean by the terms we employ so as to avoid interminable confusion.

James advocated pragmatism as a means of clearing up precisely such confusions which, he believed, were ubiquitous in philosophy.

One of the words to which he applied this approach was truth. He could find no content to the ideas of truth held either by the British empiricists of his day such as Bertrand Russell or in that held by the post_hegelian idealists such as Josiah Royce. Their interminable dispute with one another could only be settled the way the campers' dispute was settled -- by attention to practical consequences. So he offered as the content of truth the hypothesis that it is the expediant in the way of our thinking -- "expediant in almost any fashion; and expediant in the long run and on the whole of course."

James made no sharp distinction between the theory of truth and the theory of knowledge. That distinction became a canonical part of Anglo-American philosophy sometime after James' death in 1910. One might well rephrase James' theory of truth as a theory of knowledge, or of the warrant of true belief, rather than of truth itself.

Dewey's Pragmatism/Instrumentalism

John Dewey was a college professor, teaching for ten years at the University of Michigan, ten at the University of Chicago, and twenty-six at Columbia University, in New York. He was also something of an organizer within the academic world, serving as president of the American Philosophical Association 1905-06, and soon thereafter helping to found the American Association of University Professors, of which he became the first president in 1915.

As a philosopher, one of Dewey's key conceptions was dualism. His texts consist largely of the hunt for and the demolition of dichotomies, such as the ancient dichotomy between fixed realities and transient illusions.

In a 1919 essay, Dewey wrote that Plato and Aristotle came to believe in "a higher realm of fixed reality of which alone true science is possible and an inferior world of changing things with which experience and practical matters are concerned" is because they were frightened by the dangers of the world, and they hoped to escape from those dangers into an impregnable fortress of the mind. He called that essay "Escape from Peril." His own ideal, then, was the contrary one of a naturalistic philosophy (even, one might say, monistically so) that would face peril and persevere in its midst.