The word pragmatism comes from the Greek word pragma which means "practice" or "issue" (concrete situation).[7]​.

Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States in the 1870s. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his Pragmatic Maxim) is credited with its development,[8] along with turn-of-the-century contributors William James and John Dewey.[9] Its direction was determined by members of the Metaphysical Club, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright, as well as by John Dewey and George Herbert. Mead.

The first use of the name pragmatism in print was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term in the early 1870s. pragmatism.[11]​[12]​.

In turn, Peirce wrote in 1906[13] that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental in emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that on which a man is disposed to act." Peirce wrote that "of this definition, pragmatism is little more than a corollary, so that I am disposed to think of it as the grandfather of pragmatism." John Shook has said: "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, as both Peirce and James recall that it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalist speculation."[14]

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt,[15] and said that to understand a conception in a fruitful way: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception, since the conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object,"[16] which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It amounts to any conception of an object up to the general scope of conceivable implications for informed practice of the effects of that object. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimental mental reflection that arrives at conceptions in terms of imaginable confirmatory and confirmatory circumstances, a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to employment and improved verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with the inference of explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual fundamental alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and one of the founders of statistics.

Peirce lectured and wrote on pragmatism to clarify his own interpretation. By framing the meaning of a conception in terms of imaginable evidence, Peirce emphasized that since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual significance, amounts to the implications of its acceptance for general practice, rather than to any definite set of actual effects (or test results). The clarified meaning of a conception points toward its conceivable verifications, but the results are not meanings, but individual achievements.

Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition",[17] saying that "everything was happy" with James and Schiller's varied uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that, however, he coined the new name because of the increasing use of the old name in "literary journals, where it is abused". However, in a 1906 manuscript he cited his differences with James and Schiller as the cause.[18] And in a 1908 publication, his differences with James and the literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce, in any case, considered their views that truth is immutable and that infinity is real as opposed by the other pragmatists, but remained allied with them on other matters.[19]

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a class of pragmatism sometimes known as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandon. Contemporary pragmatism can be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neoclassical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Some of the thinkers who served as inspiration for several pragmatists are the following:

Contenido

Algunas de las diversas posiciones interrelacionadas que a menudo son características de los filósofos que trabajan desde un enfoque pragmático incluyen:.

Anti-reification of concepts and theories

Dewey, in The Quest for Certainty, criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": - philosophers often take categories (such as mental and physical) for granted because they do not realize that these are merely nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "Ultimate Being" of the Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction of concrete thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thought, and so on. David L. Hildebrand summarizes the problem: "Lack of attention to the specific functions encompassed by research led realists and idealists to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back into experience." (Hildebrand 2003).

Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism

From the beginning, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophies had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could understand. They maintained that these philosophies then resorted to a Kant-inspired phenomenology of the correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. The pragmatists criticized the first for its a prioriism, and the second because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism, on the other hand, tries to explain the relationship between the knower and the known.

In 1868,[20] C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of cognition unconditioned by inference and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that consciousness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were basic philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning, but can always be analyzed in finer cognitive stages. What we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind: the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around (De Waal 2005, pp. 7-10). At the same time, he persistently maintained that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from the principles of psychology understood as a special science:[21]​ what we think is too different from what we should think; In his series "Illustrations of the Logic of Science", Peirce formulated both pragmatism and the principles of statistics as aspects of the scientific method in general.[22] This is a major point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a deeper naturalism and psychologism.

Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized the attempts of many philosophers of science to create a space for epistemology that has no relation to the empirical sciences and is sometimes considered superior to them. W. V. Quine in his essay Epistemology Naturalized (Quine 1969), also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice, as well as wrong in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific research.

Reconciling antiskepticism and fallibilism

Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of antiskepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, without the ability to have a "higher vision", this does not require a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as opposed to what is called scientific skepticism).

Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope,[23]​ that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later, but still inevitably, by sufficient investigation, and (2) contrary to Descartes' famous and influential methodology in Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal command to motivate fruitful investigation, much less can begin philosophy in universal doubt.[24]​ Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act.[25]​ It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which destabilizes our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to an established state of belief about the matter. It must be taken into account that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism following Descartes. The pragmatic insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite compatible with the earlier skeptical tradition.

Pragmatic theory of truth

Pragmatic theories of truth claim that a proposition is true if it is useful or works in practice. Thus, the proposition "in summer it is hot" is true if it constitutes a good guide to action, that is, if it is useful to anyone who considers it true. The criterion of utility must be understood as an appeal to verify the truth of the propositions in practice, without caricaturing the basic premise.[26]​ If it happens just as the proposition indicates, then it is true. Thus, according to utility theory, we can only establish the truth of a proposition when we verify it in practice. This requirement does not occur in the correspondence theory, in which a proposition is true if it corresponds to the facts, even if the facts cannot be verified. Obviously, the verification of a proposition is subject to certain limitations: it must first be verifiable, and furthermore verification is not infallible.[27]​[28]​[29]​.

The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing.[30]​ Do the belief dispositions that qualify as true or false depend on how useful they are in inquiry and action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In pragmatism, nothing practical or useful is considered necessarily true, nor anything that helps one survive merely in the short term. For example, believing that my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it certainly isn't helpful from a longer-term perspective because it doesn't match the facts (and therefore isn't true).

Pragmatic epistemology

Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism since what is useful for an organism is that it can differ enormously from what is true. Here knowledge and action are represented as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any type of research bodies used to deal with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry concerns how organisms can control their environment. Real and true are functional labels in research and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist in the way it recognizes an external world that must be dealt with.

Mientras que el pragmatismo comenzó simplemente como un criterio de significado, rápidamente se expandió para convertirse en una epistemología completa con implicaciones de amplio alcance para todo el campo filosófico. Los pragmáticos que trabajan en estos campos comparten una inspiración común, pero su trabajo es diverso.

Philosophy of Science

In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be expressed in terms of concepts and theories that somehow reflect reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in the explanation and prediction of phenomena. Instrumentalism does not claim that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsehood mean and how they function in science.

One of C. I. Lewis's main arguments in Mind and the World Order is: "The outline of a theory of knowledge is that science not only provides a copy of reality, but must work with conceptual systems and that they are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid research. Lewis's own development of multiple modal logics is a good example. Lewis is sometimes called a "conceptual pragmatist" because of this." (Lewis 1929).

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 mainly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement often do not refer to them.

W. V. Quine's document "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the most famous articles in the philosophy of the century in the analytical tradition. The document is an attack on two central tenets of the philosophy of logical positivists. One is the distinction between analytical statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsity) is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ("all bachelors are not married") and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsity) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that every meaningful statement derives its meaning from a logical construction of terms that 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, F.C.S. Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the closest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary philosophy of language. 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 major 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 he had criticized in Formal Logic. What he offers is something that philosophers would recognize today as a logic that covers the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.

Considering that F.C.S. Schiller ruled out the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are more critical of its claim to ultimate validity and see logic as one tool among others, or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. C.S. Peirce developed multiple methods for making formal logic.

Stephen Toulmin's uses of argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetorical studies (although it is an epistemological work).

Metaphysics

James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most direct way: experience is the definitive proof and experience is what needs to be explained. They were not satisfied with ordinary empiricism because, according to the tradition dating back to Hume, empiricists tended to think that experience was nothing more than individual sensations. For pragmatists, this goes against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain everything that occurs in experience, including connections and meaning, rather than 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 rather than explaining them as subjective additions to a world of humming atoms.

William James offers an interesting example of this philosophical deficiency:

F. C. S. Schiller's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx, was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatic movement taking place in the United States. In it, Schiller advocates a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called hard-minded empiricism and soft-minded rationalism. Schiller argues, 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., imperfection, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact kind of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid investigation, but is only valuable to the extent that it aids in explanation.

In the second half of the century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme, and therefore that it is pointless to ask what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the post-analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world must recognize both the "syntactic" aspects of reality (i.e., atoms humming) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value).

Radical empiricism gives interesting answers to questions about the limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value, and the viability of reductionism. These questions figure prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed - although most pragmatists would disagree - that science degrades all that is meaningful into "merely" 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 relationship of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. Instead, they argue that there is no need to place mind as an ontological category.

Pragmatists disagree about whether philosophers should take a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former (Rorty, among them) want to put an end to the problem because they believe it is a pseudo-problem, while the latter believe it is a significant empirical question.

Ethics

Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Both facts and values ​​have cognitive content: knowledge is what we must believe; Values ​​are hypotheses about what is good in action. Pragmatic ethics is broadly humanistic because it sees no definitive test of morality beyond what matters to us as humans. Good values ​​are those for which we have good reasons. The pragmatic formulation predates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values ​​and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle.

William James attempted to show the significance of (some types of) spirituality, but, like other pragmatists, he did not see religion as the basis of meaning or morality.

William James's contribution to ethics, as presented in his essay The Will to Believe, has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. In his own terms, he argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always expect adequate evidence when making moral decisions.

Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively on morality and democracy. (Edel 1993) In his classic article Three Independent Factors in Morals (Dewey 1930), he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: right, virtue, and good. He argued that while all three provide meaningful ways of thinking about moral issues, the possibility of conflict between the three elements cannot always be easily resolved. (Anderson, SEP).

Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends that he considered responsible for the degradation of our daily working and educational lives. He emphasized the need for meaningful work and a conception of education that considered it not as preparation for life but as life itself. (Dewey 2004 [1910] chapter 7, Dewey 1997 [1938], p.47).

Dewey opposed other ethical philosophies of his time, especially the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and the values ​​of thought could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he called consummatory experience. A further implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible enterprise, since human beings often cannot know what would satisfy them.

During the transition from the 21st century to the 21st century, many accepted pragmatism in the field of bioethics led by philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book "The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering" (see designer baby) won praise within American classical philosophy and bioethics criticism for its development of a pragmatic theory of bioethics and its rejection of the theory of principalism then in vogue in ethics. medical. An anthology published by The MIT Press, included philosophers' responses 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 himself developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independently of the work of Dewey and James, but expanding on it.

Aesthetics

Art as Experience by John Dewey, based on the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture, and everyday experience. Art, for Dewey, is or should be part of everyone's creative life and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. It also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a departure from the transcendental approach to aesthetics following Immanuel Kant, who emphasized the uniqueness of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation.

A prominent contemporary pragmatic esthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "expression" that is not an ontological whim but is in line with other human activity and culture in general. It emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to understand, and that no particular interpretation can be given.

Philosophy of religion

Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can continue to 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 to the extent that it works. Therefore, the claim, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help you achieve the things you pray for, and (b) may be better explained by referring to its sedative effect than that prayers are heard.

As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion, but neither is it an apology for faith. However, James's metaphysical position leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions are true. As he observed at the end of the Varieties, his position is not equivalent to denying the existence of transcendent realities. On the contrary, he defended the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in the life of an individual and refer to statements that cannot be verified or falsified either by intellectual or common sensory reasons.

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 that adequately exhibit Peirce's alterity: things that offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, things that affect us, such as numbers, can be said to be "real," even though they do not "exist." Margolis suggests that God, in such linguistic usage, might well be "real," causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist."

Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used by various thinkers that incorporate important ideas and yet diverge significantly from classical pragmatists. This divergence can occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in conceptual training (C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey, Richard Rorty does not like Peirce). Important analytical neopragmatists include Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. The Brazilian social thinker Roberto Unger advocates a "radical pragmatism", which "denatures" society and culture, and therefore insists that we can "transform the character of our relationship in the social and cultural worlds we inhabit instead of only changing, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that compose them." [21] Stanley Fish, the late Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to continental analytical thinking.

Neoclassical pragmatism denotes those thinkers who consider themselves heirs of the project of the classical pragmatists. Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (known for the theory of fundherentism) are well-known examples. Many pragmatic ideas (especially those of Peirce) find natural expression in the decision-theoretic reconstruction of the epistemology pursued in the work of Isaac Levi. Nicholas Rescher defends his version of "methodical pragmatism" based on interpreting pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means for their demonstration.

Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. It is likely, considering the advent of post-analytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, that more philosophers will be influenced by pragmatist thought without necessarily publicly engaging with that philosophical school. Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine, falls into this category, as does Stephen Toulmin, who arrived at his philosophical position through Wittgenstein, whom he calls "a pragmatist of a sophisticated type" (preface to Dewey 1929 in the 1988 edition, p. XIII). Another example is Mark Johnson whose embodied philosophy (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) shares psychologism, direct realism, and anti-Cartesianism with pragmatism.

Conceptual pragmatism is a theory of knowledge that originates with the work of philosopher and logician Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the 1929 book, Mind and World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge..

"French pragmatism" features theorists such as Bruno Latour, Michel Crozier, Luc Boltanski, and Laurent Thévenot.) It is often seen as opposed to the structural problems related to Pierre Bourdieu's French critical theory.

En el siglo , los movimientos del positivismo lógico y la filosofía del lenguaje ordinario tienen similitudes con el pragmatismo. Al igual que el pragmatismo, el positivismo lógico proporciona un criterio de verificación de significado que se supone que nos libera de la metafísica sin sentido, sin embargo, el positivismo lógico no acentúa la acción como lo hace el pragmatismo. Los pragmatistas raramente usaban su máxima de significado para descartar toda metafísica como una tontería. Por lo general, el pragmatismo se planteó para corregir las doctrinas metafísicas o para construir las empíricamente verificables en lugar de proporcionar un rechazo total.

La filosofía del lenguaje ordinario está más cerca del pragmatismo que otras filosofías del lenguaje debido a su carácter nominalista y porque considera el funcionamiento más amplio del lenguaje en un entorno como su foco en lugar de investigar las relaciones abstractas entre el lenguaje y el mundo.

El pragmatismo tiene lazos para procesar la filosofía. Gran parte de su trabajo se desarrolló en diálogo con filósofos como Henri Bergson y Alfred North Whitehead, quienes generalmente no son considerados pragmáticos porque difieren tanto en otros puntos. (Douglas Browning y otros, 1998; Rescher, SEP).

El conductismo y el funcionalismo "Funcionalismo (psicología)") en psicología y sociología también tienen vínculos con el pragmatismo, lo que no es sorprendente si se tiene en cuenta que James y Dewey eran ambos estudiosos de la psicología y que Mead se convirtió en sociólogo.

El utilitarismo tiene algunos paralelismos significativos con el pragmatismo y John Stuart Mill defendió valores similares.

El pragmatismo enfatiza la conexión entre el pensamiento y la acción. Los campos aplicados como administración pública,[31]​ ciencias políticas,[32]​ estudios de liderazgo,[33]​ relaciones internacionales,[34]​ resolución de conflictos,[35]​ y metodología de investigación[36]​ han incorporado los principios del pragmatismo en su campo. A menudo, esta conexión se realiza utilizando la noción expansiva de democracia de Dewey y Addams.

Effects on social sciences

Symbolic interactionism, a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism in the early 1900s, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, as well as that of Peirce and William James.[37]

Increasing attention is being paid to pragmatist epistemology in other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with divisive debates about the state of social scientific knowledge.[38]​[9]​.

Supporters suggest that pragmatism offers an approach that is both pluralistic and practical.[39]​.

Effects on public administration

The classical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of Public Administration. Scholars claim that classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of public administration.[31]​[40]​ At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for making programs "work" in a plural, problem-oriented environment. Public administrators are also responsible for daily work with citizens. Dewey's participatory democracy can be applied in this setting. The notion of Dewey and James Theory as a tool helps administrators develop theories to solve administrative and political problems. Furthermore, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists.

Which pragmatism (classical pragmatism or neopragmatism) makes more sense in public administration has been a source of debate. The debate began when Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey's notion of the Community of Inquiry.[41] Hugh Miller objected to some elements of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy).[42] This was followed by a debate that included responses from a practitioner,[43]​ an economist,[44]​ a planner,[45]​ other public administration scholars,[46]​[47]​ and prominent philosophers.[48]​[49]​ Miller[50]​ and Shields[51]​ also responded.

Additionally, applied public administration scholarship evaluating charter schools, outsourcing, financial management, performance measurement, urban quality of life initiatives, and urban planning in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the development of the conceptual framework and approach to analysis.[52]​.

However, the use of pragmatism by healthcare administrators has been criticized as incomplete,[53] according to classical pragmatists, knowledge is always shaped by human interests. The administrator's focus on "results" simply promotes his own interest, and this focus on results often undermines the interests of his citizens, who are often more interested in the process. On the other hand, David Brendel argues that pragmatism's ability to bridge dualisms, focus on practical problems, include multiple perspectives, incorporate the participation of stakeholders (patient, family, health team), and its provisional nature makes it suitable for addressing problems in this area.[54]​.

Effects on feminism

Since the mid-1990s, feminist philosophers have rediscovered classical pragmatism as a source of feminist theories. The works of Seigfried,[55]​[56]​[57]​ Duran,[58]​[59]​ Keith,[60]​ and Whipps[61]​ explore the historical and philosophical links between feminism and pragmatism. The connection between pragmatism and feminism took so long to be rediscovered because pragmatism itself was eclipsed by logical positivism during the middle decades of the century. As a result, she was lost from feminist discourse. The same characteristics of pragmatism that led to its decline are the characteristics that feminists now consider its greatest strength. These are "persistent and early critiques of positivist interpretations of scientific methodology; revelation of the value dimension of factual claims"; see aesthetics as information from everyday experience; subordinate logical analysis to political, cultural and social issues; unite dominant discourses with domination; "realign theory with praxis and resist the turn toward epistemology and instead emphasize concrete experience."[56] These feminist philosophers point to Jane Addams as the founder of classical pragmatism. Furthermore, the ideas of Dewey, Mead, and James are consistent with many feminist principles. Jane Addams, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead developed their philosophies as the three became friends, influenced each other, and participated in the Hull House experience and women's rights causes.

Effects on urban planning

Pragmatism assesses and evaluates the effects of a design on urban transformation, and the effects of a concept or design alter the general understanding of the concept. Richard Rorty mentions that "a radical change" is occurring in recent philosophical thought: "a change so profound that we may not recognize that it is occurring." While the world in which the movement is rooted has undergone many changes, as a framework for perceiving the world, pragmatism has also undergone different levels of modifications. Those changes are very relevant for the development of cities and basic themes, such as anti-fundamentalism, fallibilism, questioning the clear distinction between theory and practice, pluralism and democracy, pragmatism can be applied to urbanism even more strongly.

Vincent di Norcia") argues that a pragmatic approach is appropriate with respect to social problems because it requires problem-solving behavior as it continually evaluates the practical effects of a project. This ensures the interest of stakeholders and Norcia emphasizes the importance of social and cognitive pluralism. Social pluralism means that we must recognize the interests of all stakeholders who are affected by a given decision, without taking into account the interests of elite political or economic groups. As a complement, Norcia also emphasizes cognitive pluralism, which indicates that one It must include all types of knowledge that is relevant to a problem.[63]​.

The word pragmatism comes from the Greek word pragma which means "practice" or "issue" (concrete situation).[7]​.

Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States in the 1870s. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his Pragmatic Maxim) is credited with its development,[8] along with turn-of-the-century contributors William James and John Dewey.[9] Its direction was determined by members of the Metaphysical Club, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright, as well as by John Dewey and George Herbert. Mead.

The first use of the name pragmatism in print was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term in the early 1870s. pragmatism.[11]​[12]​.

In turn, Peirce wrote in 1906[13] that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental in emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that on which a man is disposed to act." Peirce wrote that "of this definition, pragmatism is little more than a corollary, so that I am disposed to think of it as the grandfather of pragmatism." John Shook has said: "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, as both Peirce and James recall that it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalist speculation."[14]

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt,[15] and said that to understand a conception in a fruitful way: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception, since the conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object,"[16] which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It amounts to any conception of an object up to the general scope of conceivable implications for informed practice of the effects of that object. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimental mental reflection that arrives at conceptions in terms of imaginable confirmatory and confirmatory circumstances, a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to employment and improved verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with the inference of explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual fundamental alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and one of the founders of statistics.

Peirce lectured and wrote on pragmatism to clarify his own interpretation. By framing the meaning of a conception in terms of imaginable evidence, Peirce emphasized that since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual significance, amounts to the implications of its acceptance for general practice, rather than to any definite set of actual effects (or test results). The clarified meaning of a conception points toward its conceivable verifications, but the results are not meanings, but individual achievements.

Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition",[17] saying that "everything was happy" with James and Schiller's varied uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that, however, he coined the new name because of the increasing use of the old name in "literary journals, where it is abused". However, in a 1906 manuscript he cited his differences with James and Schiller as the cause.[18] And in a 1908 publication, his differences with James and the literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce, in any case, considered their views that truth is immutable and that infinity is real as opposed by the other pragmatists, but remained allied with them on other matters.[19]

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a class of pragmatism sometimes known as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandon. Contemporary pragmatism can be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neoclassical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Some of the thinkers who served as inspiration for several pragmatists are the following:

Contenido

Algunas de las diversas posiciones interrelacionadas que a menudo son características de los filósofos que trabajan desde un enfoque pragmático incluyen:.

Anti-reification of concepts and theories

Dewey, in The Quest for Certainty, criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": - philosophers often take categories (such as mental and physical) for granted because they do not realize that these are merely nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "Ultimate Being" of the Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction of concrete thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thought, and so on. David L. Hildebrand summarizes the problem: "Lack of attention to the specific functions encompassed by research led realists and idealists to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back into experience." (Hildebrand 2003).

Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism

From the beginning, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophies had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could understand. They maintained that these philosophies then resorted to a Kant-inspired phenomenology of the correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. The pragmatists criticized the first for its a prioriism, and the second because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism, on the other hand, tries to explain the relationship between the knower and the known.

In 1868,[20] C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of cognition unconditioned by inference and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that consciousness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were basic philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning, but can always be analyzed in finer cognitive stages. What we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind: the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around (De Waal 2005, pp. 7-10). At the same time, he persistently maintained that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from the principles of psychology understood as a special science:[21]​ what we think is too different from what we should think; In his series "Illustrations of the Logic of Science", Peirce formulated both pragmatism and the principles of statistics as aspects of the scientific method in general.[22] This is a major point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a deeper naturalism and psychologism.

Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized the attempts of many philosophers of science to create a space for epistemology that has no relation to the empirical sciences and is sometimes considered superior to them. W. V. Quine in his essay Epistemology Naturalized (Quine 1969), also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice, as well as wrong in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific research.

Reconciling antiskepticism and fallibilism

Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of antiskepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, without the ability to have a "higher vision", this does not require a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as opposed to what is called scientific skepticism).

Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope,[23]​ that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later, but still inevitably, by sufficient investigation, and (2) contrary to Descartes' famous and influential methodology in Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal command to motivate fruitful investigation, much less can begin philosophy in universal doubt.[24]​ Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act.[25]​ It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which destabilizes our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to an established state of belief about the matter. It must be taken into account that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism following Descartes. The pragmatic insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite compatible with the earlier skeptical tradition.

Pragmatic theory of truth

Pragmatic theories of truth claim that a proposition is true if it is useful or works in practice. Thus, the proposition "in summer it is hot" is true if it constitutes a good guide to action, that is, if it is useful to anyone who considers it true. The criterion of utility must be understood as an appeal to verify the truth of the propositions in practice, without caricaturing the basic premise.[26]​ If it happens just as the proposition indicates, then it is true. Thus, according to utility theory, we can only establish the truth of a proposition when we verify it in practice. This requirement does not occur in the correspondence theory, in which a proposition is true if it corresponds to the facts, even if the facts cannot be verified. Obviously, the verification of a proposition is subject to certain limitations: it must first be verifiable, and furthermore verification is not infallible.[27]​[28]​[29]​.

The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing.[30]​ Do the belief dispositions that qualify as true or false depend on how useful they are in inquiry and action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In pragmatism, nothing practical or useful is considered necessarily true, nor anything that helps one survive merely in the short term. For example, believing that my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it certainly isn't helpful from a longer-term perspective because it doesn't match the facts (and therefore isn't true).

Pragmatic epistemology

Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism since what is useful for an organism is that it can differ enormously from what is true. Here knowledge and action are represented as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any type of research bodies used to deal with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry concerns how organisms can control their environment. Real and true are functional labels in research and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist in the way it recognizes an external world that must be dealt with.

Mientras que el pragmatismo comenzó simplemente como un criterio de significado, rápidamente se expandió para convertirse en una epistemología completa con implicaciones de amplio alcance para todo el campo filosófico. Los pragmáticos que trabajan en estos campos comparten una inspiración común, pero su trabajo es diverso.

Philosophy of Science

In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be expressed in terms of concepts and theories that somehow reflect reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in the explanation and prediction of phenomena. Instrumentalism does not claim that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsehood mean and how they function in science.

One of C. I. Lewis's main arguments in Mind and the World Order is: "The outline of a theory of knowledge is that science not only provides a copy of reality, but must work with conceptual systems and that they are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid research. Lewis's own development of multiple modal logics is a good example. Lewis is sometimes called a "conceptual pragmatist" because of this." (Lewis 1929).

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 mainly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement often do not refer to them.

W. V. Quine's document "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the most famous articles in the philosophy of the century in the analytical tradition. The document is an attack on two central tenets of the philosophy of logical positivists. One is the distinction between analytical statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsity) is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ("all bachelors are not married") and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsity) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that every meaningful statement derives its meaning from a logical construction of terms that 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, F.C.S. Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the closest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary philosophy of language. 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 major 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 he had criticized in Formal Logic. What he offers is something that philosophers would recognize today as a logic that covers the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.

Considering that F.C.S. Schiller ruled out the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are more critical of its claim to ultimate validity and see logic as one tool among others, or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. C.S. Peirce developed multiple methods for making formal logic.

Stephen Toulmin's uses of argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetorical studies (although it is an epistemological work).

Metaphysics

James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most direct way: experience is the definitive proof and experience is what needs to be explained. They were not satisfied with ordinary empiricism because, according to the tradition dating back to Hume, empiricists tended to think that experience was nothing more than individual sensations. For pragmatists, this goes against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain everything that occurs in experience, including connections and meaning, rather than 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 rather than explaining them as subjective additions to a world of humming atoms.

William James offers an interesting example of this philosophical deficiency:

F. C. S. Schiller's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx, was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatic movement taking place in the United States. In it, Schiller advocates a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called hard-minded empiricism and soft-minded rationalism. Schiller argues, 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., imperfection, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact kind of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid investigation, but is only valuable to the extent that it aids in explanation.

In the second half of the century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme, and therefore that it is pointless to ask what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the post-analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world must recognize both the "syntactic" aspects of reality (i.e., atoms humming) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value).

Radical empiricism gives interesting answers to questions about the limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value, and the viability of reductionism. These questions figure prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed - although most pragmatists would disagree - that science degrades all that is meaningful into "merely" 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 relationship of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. Instead, they argue that there is no need to place mind as an ontological category.

Pragmatists disagree about whether philosophers should take a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former (Rorty, among them) want to put an end to the problem because they believe it is a pseudo-problem, while the latter believe it is a significant empirical question.

Ethics

Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Both facts and values ​​have cognitive content: knowledge is what we must believe; Values ​​are hypotheses about what is good in action. Pragmatic ethics is broadly humanistic because it sees no definitive test of morality beyond what matters to us as humans. Good values ​​are those for which we have good reasons. The pragmatic formulation predates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values ​​and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle.

William James attempted to show the significance of (some types of) spirituality, but, like other pragmatists, he did not see religion as the basis of meaning or morality.

William James's contribution to ethics, as presented in his essay The Will to Believe, has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. In his own terms, he argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always expect adequate evidence when making moral decisions.

Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively on morality and democracy. (Edel 1993) In his classic article Three Independent Factors in Morals (Dewey 1930), he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: right, virtue, and good. He argued that while all three provide meaningful ways of thinking about moral issues, the possibility of conflict between the three elements cannot always be easily resolved. (Anderson, SEP).

Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends that he considered responsible for the degradation of our daily working and educational lives. He emphasized the need for meaningful work and a conception of education that considered it not as preparation for life but as life itself. (Dewey 2004 [1910] chapter 7, Dewey 1997 [1938], p.47).

Dewey opposed other ethical philosophies of his time, especially the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and the values ​​of thought could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he called consummatory experience. A further implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible enterprise, since human beings often cannot know what would satisfy them.

During the transition from the 21st century to the 21st century, many accepted pragmatism in the field of bioethics led by philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book "The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering" (see designer baby) won praise within American classical philosophy and bioethics criticism for its development of a pragmatic theory of bioethics and its rejection of the theory of principalism then in vogue in ethics. medical. An anthology published by The MIT Press, included philosophers' responses 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 himself developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independently of the work of Dewey and James, but expanding on it.

Aesthetics

Art as Experience by John Dewey, based on the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture, and everyday experience. Art, for Dewey, is or should be part of everyone's creative life and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. It also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a departure from the transcendental approach to aesthetics following Immanuel Kant, who emphasized the uniqueness of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation.

A prominent contemporary pragmatic esthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "expression" that is not an ontological whim but is in line with other human activity and culture in general. It emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to understand, and that no particular interpretation can be given.

Philosophy of religion

Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can continue to 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 to the extent that it works. Therefore, the claim, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help you achieve the things you pray for, and (b) may be better explained by referring to its sedative effect than that prayers are heard.

As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion, but neither is it an apology for faith. However, James's metaphysical position leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions are true. As he observed at the end of the Varieties, his position is not equivalent to denying the existence of transcendent realities. On the contrary, he defended the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in the life of an individual and refer to statements that cannot be verified or falsified either by intellectual or common sensory reasons.

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 that adequately exhibit Peirce's alterity: things that offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, things that affect us, such as numbers, can be said to be "real," even though they do not "exist." Margolis suggests that God, in such linguistic usage, might well be "real," causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist."

Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used by various thinkers that incorporate important ideas and yet diverge significantly from classical pragmatists. This divergence can occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in conceptual training (C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey, Richard Rorty does not like Peirce). Important analytical neopragmatists include Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. The Brazilian social thinker Roberto Unger advocates a "radical pragmatism", which "denatures" society and culture, and therefore insists that we can "transform the character of our relationship in the social and cultural worlds we inhabit instead of only changing, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that compose them." [21] Stanley Fish, the late Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to continental analytical thinking.

Neoclassical pragmatism denotes those thinkers who consider themselves heirs of the project of the classical pragmatists. Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (known for the theory of fundherentism) are well-known examples. Many pragmatic ideas (especially those of Peirce) find natural expression in the decision-theoretic reconstruction of the epistemology pursued in the work of Isaac Levi. Nicholas Rescher defends his version of "methodical pragmatism" based on interpreting pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means for their demonstration.

Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. It is likely, considering the advent of post-analytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, that more philosophers will be influenced by pragmatist thought without necessarily publicly engaging with that philosophical school. Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine, falls into this category, as does Stephen Toulmin, who arrived at his philosophical position through Wittgenstein, whom he calls "a pragmatist of a sophisticated type" (preface to Dewey 1929 in the 1988 edition, p. XIII). Another example is Mark Johnson whose embodied philosophy (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) shares psychologism, direct realism, and anti-Cartesianism with pragmatism.

Conceptual pragmatism is a theory of knowledge that originates with the work of philosopher and logician Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the 1929 book, Mind and World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge..

"French pragmatism" features theorists such as Bruno Latour, Michel Crozier, Luc Boltanski, and Laurent Thévenot.) It is often seen as opposed to the structural problems related to Pierre Bourdieu's French critical theory.

En el siglo , los movimientos del positivismo lógico y la filosofía del lenguaje ordinario tienen similitudes con el pragmatismo. Al igual que el pragmatismo, el positivismo lógico proporciona un criterio de verificación de significado que se supone que nos libera de la metafísica sin sentido, sin embargo, el positivismo lógico no acentúa la acción como lo hace el pragmatismo. Los pragmatistas raramente usaban su máxima de significado para descartar toda metafísica como una tontería. Por lo general, el pragmatismo se planteó para corregir las doctrinas metafísicas o para construir las empíricamente verificables en lugar de proporcionar un rechazo total.

La filosofía del lenguaje ordinario está más cerca del pragmatismo que otras filosofías del lenguaje debido a su carácter nominalista y porque considera el funcionamiento más amplio del lenguaje en un entorno como su foco en lugar de investigar las relaciones abstractas entre el lenguaje y el mundo.

El pragmatismo tiene lazos para procesar la filosofía. Gran parte de su trabajo se desarrolló en diálogo con filósofos como Henri Bergson y Alfred North Whitehead, quienes generalmente no son considerados pragmáticos porque difieren tanto en otros puntos. (Douglas Browning y otros, 1998; Rescher, SEP).

El conductismo y el funcionalismo "Funcionalismo (psicología)") en psicología y sociología también tienen vínculos con el pragmatismo, lo que no es sorprendente si se tiene en cuenta que James y Dewey eran ambos estudiosos de la psicología y que Mead se convirtió en sociólogo.

El utilitarismo tiene algunos paralelismos significativos con el pragmatismo y John Stuart Mill defendió valores similares.

El pragmatismo enfatiza la conexión entre el pensamiento y la acción. Los campos aplicados como administración pública,[31]​ ciencias políticas,[32]​ estudios de liderazgo,[33]​ relaciones internacionales,[34]​ resolución de conflictos,[35]​ y metodología de investigación[36]​ han incorporado los principios del pragmatismo en su campo. A menudo, esta conexión se realiza utilizando la noción expansiva de democracia de Dewey y Addams.

Effects on social sciences

Symbolic interactionism, a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism in the early 1900s, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, as well as that of Peirce and William James.[37]

Increasing attention is being paid to pragmatist epistemology in other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with divisive debates about the state of social scientific knowledge.[38]​[9]​.

Supporters suggest that pragmatism offers an approach that is both pluralistic and practical.[39]​.

Effects on public administration

The classical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of Public Administration. Scholars claim that classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of public administration.[31]​[40]​ At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for making programs "work" in a plural, problem-oriented environment. Public administrators are also responsible for daily work with citizens. Dewey's participatory democracy can be applied in this setting. The notion of Dewey and James Theory as a tool helps administrators develop theories to solve administrative and political problems. Furthermore, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists.

Which pragmatism (classical pragmatism or neopragmatism) makes more sense in public administration has been a source of debate. The debate began when Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey's notion of the Community of Inquiry.[41] Hugh Miller objected to some elements of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy).[42] This was followed by a debate that included responses from a practitioner,[43]​ an economist,[44]​ a planner,[45]​ other public administration scholars,[46]​[47]​ and prominent philosophers.[48]​[49]​ Miller[50]​ and Shields[51]​ also responded.

Additionally, applied public administration scholarship evaluating charter schools, outsourcing, financial management, performance measurement, urban quality of life initiatives, and urban planning in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the development of the conceptual framework and approach to analysis.[52]​.

However, the use of pragmatism by healthcare administrators has been criticized as incomplete,[53] according to classical pragmatists, knowledge is always shaped by human interests. The administrator's focus on "results" simply promotes his own interest, and this focus on results often undermines the interests of his citizens, who are often more interested in the process. On the other hand, David Brendel argues that pragmatism's ability to bridge dualisms, focus on practical problems, include multiple perspectives, incorporate the participation of stakeholders (patient, family, health team), and its provisional nature makes it suitable for addressing problems in this area.[54]​.

Effects on feminism

Since the mid-1990s, feminist philosophers have rediscovered classical pragmatism as a source of feminist theories. The works of Seigfried,[55]​[56]​[57]​ Duran,[58]​[59]​ Keith,[60]​ and Whipps[61]​ explore the historical and philosophical links between feminism and pragmatism. The connection between pragmatism and feminism took so long to be rediscovered because pragmatism itself was eclipsed by logical positivism during the middle decades of the century. As a result, she was lost from feminist discourse. The same characteristics of pragmatism that led to its decline are the characteristics that feminists now consider its greatest strength. These are "persistent and early critiques of positivist interpretations of scientific methodology; revelation of the value dimension of factual claims"; see aesthetics as information from everyday experience; subordinate logical analysis to political, cultural and social issues; unite dominant discourses with domination; "realign theory with praxis and resist the turn toward epistemology and instead emphasize concrete experience."[56] These feminist philosophers point to Jane Addams as the founder of classical pragmatism. Furthermore, the ideas of Dewey, Mead, and James are consistent with many feminist principles. Jane Addams, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead developed their philosophies as the three became friends, influenced each other, and participated in the Hull House experience and women's rights causes.

Effects on urban planning

Pragmatism assesses and evaluates the effects of a design on urban transformation, and the effects of a concept or design alter the general understanding of the concept. Richard Rorty mentions that "a radical change" is occurring in recent philosophical thought: "a change so profound that we may not recognize that it is occurring." While the world in which the movement is rooted has undergone many changes, as a framework for perceiving the world, pragmatism has also undergone different levels of modifications. Those changes are very relevant for the development of cities and basic themes, such as anti-fundamentalism, fallibilism, questioning the clear distinction between theory and practice, pluralism and democracy, pragmatism can be applied to urbanism even more strongly.

Vincent di Norcia") argues that a pragmatic approach is appropriate with respect to social problems because it requires problem-solving behavior as it continually evaluates the practical effects of a project. This ensures the interest of stakeholders and Norcia emphasizes the importance of social and cognitive pluralism. Social pluralism means that we must recognize the interests of all stakeholders who are affected by a given decision, without taking into account the interests of elite political or economic groups. As a complement, Norcia also emphasizes cognitive pluralism, which indicates that one It must include all types of knowledge that is relevant to a problem.[63]​.