Editing Pragmatism (section)

===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.