Editing Pragmatism (section)

==In other fields==
While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views.

===Philosophy of science<!--'Conceptual pragmatism' redirects here-->===
In the philosophy of science, [[instrumentalism]] is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science.

One of [[C.&nbsp;I. Lewis]]' main arguments in ''Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge'' (1929) was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of multiple [[modal logic]]s is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of '''conceptual pragmatism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> because of this.<ref>Sandra B. Rosenthal, ''C.I. Lewis in Focus: The Pulse of Pragmatism'', Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 28.</ref>

Another development is the cooperation of [[logical positivism]] and pragmatism in the works of [[Charles W. Morris]] and [[Rudolf Carnap]]. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the [[pragmatic maxim]] into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement do not often refer to them.

[[W.&nbsp;V. Quine]]'s paper "[[Two Dogmas of Empiricism]]", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not a priori truths but synthetic statements.

===Logic===
Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, ''Formal Logic''. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an [[ordinary language philosophy]]. Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book ''Formal Logic''. In this sequel, ''Logic for Use'', Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in ''Formal Logic''. What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.

Whereas Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C.&nbsp;I. Lewis. C.&nbsp;S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic.

[[Stephen Toulmin]]'s ''The Uses of Argument'' inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work).

===Metaphysics===
James and Dewey were [[empiricism|empirical]] thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality. [[Radical empiricism]], or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.

[[File:Chicago Club 1896.jpg|thumb|right|The "Chicago Club" including Mead, Dewey, Angell, and Moore. Pragmatism is sometimes called American pragmatism because so many of its proponents were and are Americans.]]
William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:
{{quotation|[A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. ... In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it ... It is no explanation of our concrete universe<ref>James 1907, pp. 8–9</ref>}}

[[F.&nbsp;C.&nbsp;S. Schiller]]'s first book ''Riddles of the Sphinx'' was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation.

In the second half of the 20th century, [[Stephen Toulmin]] argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the [[postanalytic philosophy|postanalytic philosopher]] [[Daniel Dennett]], who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing atoms) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value).{{citation needed|date=July 2014}}

Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about the limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of [[reductionism]]. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the [[relationship between religion and science]], where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" [[materialism|physical phenomena]].

===Philosophy of mind===
Both [[John Dewey]] in ''Experience and Nature'' (1929) and, half a century later, [[Richard Rorty]] in his ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an [[ontological]] category.

Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question. {{citation needed|date=September 2019}}

===Ethics===
{{main|Pragmatic ethics}}

Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly [[humanism|humanist]] because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the [[good reasons approach]]. The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as [[Jerome Schneewind]] and [[John Searle]].

[[File:william james small.png|thumb|right|William James tried to show the meaningfulness of (some kinds of) spirituality but, like other pragmatists, did not see religion as the basis of meaning or morality.]]
William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay ''The Will to Believe'' has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions.
{{quotation|Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. ... A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.<ref>[http://falcon.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html The Will to Believe] James 1896</ref>}}

Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy.<ref>Edel 1993</ref> In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals",<ref>Dewey 1930</ref> he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved.<ref>Anderson, SEP</ref>

Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a [[Definitions of education|conception of education]] that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself.<ref>Dewey 2004 [1910] ch. 7; Dewey 1997 [1938], p.&nbsp;47</ref>

Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the [[emotivism]] of [[Alfred Ayer]]. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed ''consummatory experience''. An additional implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them.

During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of [[bioethics]] led by the philosophers [[John Lachs]] and his student [[Glenn McGee]], whose 1997 book ''The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering'' (see [[designer baby]]) garnered praise from within classical [[American philosophy]] and criticism from bioethics for its development of a theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in [[medical ethics]]. An anthology published by the [[MIT Press]] titled ''Pragmatic Bioethics'' included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.

A recent pragmatist contribution to [[meta-ethics]] is Todd Lekan's ''Making Morality''.<ref>Lekan 2003</ref> Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent.

===Aesthetics===
John Dewey's ''Art as Experience'', based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard University, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience (''IEP''). Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the [[Transcendental idealism|transcendental]] approach to [[aesthetics]] in the wake of [[Immanuel Kant]] who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is [[Joseph Margolis]]. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given.

===Philosophy of religion===
Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in ''A Common Faith'' and the latter in ''The Varieties of Religious Experience''.

From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of [[Transcendence (religion)|transcendent realities]]. Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds.

[[Joseph Margolis]] in ''Historied Thought, Constructed World'' (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's ''Secondness'': things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist".

===Education===
{{Expand section|date=October 2023}}
Pragmatic pedagogy is an [[Philosophy of education|educational philosophy]] that emphasizes teaching students knowledge that is practical for life and encourages them to grow into better people. American philosopher [[John Dewey]] is considered one of the main thinkers of the pragmatist educational approach.