Pragmaticism
Encyclopedia
Pragmaticism is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for his pragmatic philosophy starting in 1905, in order to distance himself and it
from pragmatism
, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". Peirce in 1905 announced his coinage "pragmaticism", saying that it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (Collected Papers (CP) 5.414). Today, outside of philosophy, "pragmatism" is often taken to refer to a compromise of aims or principles, even a ruthless search for mercenary advantage. Peirce gave other or more specific reasons for the distinction in a surviving draft letter that year and in later writings. Peirce's pragmatism, that is, pragmaticism, differed in Peirce's view from other pragmatisms by its commitments to the spirit of strict logic, the immutability of truth, the reality of infinity, and the difference between (1) actively willing to control thought, to doubt, to weigh reasons, and (2) willing not to exert the will, willing to believe. In his view his pragmatism is, strictly speaking, not itself a whole philosophy, but instead a general method for the clarification of ideas. He first publicly formulated his pragmatism as an aspect of scientific logic along with principles of statistics
and modes of inference in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series of articles in 1877-8.
" or "pragmaticism"—and Peirce himself was not always consistent about it even after the notorious renaming—his conception of pragmatic philosophy is based on one or another version of the so-called "pragmatic maxim
". Here is one of his more emphatic statements of it:
In the 1909 Century Dictionary
Supplement, the entry for pragmaticism, written, it now appears, by John Dewey, was
among Peirce, William James
, Chauncey Wright
, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot
, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner. The first use in print of the name pragmatism appears to have been in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with having coined the name during the early 1870s.
James, among others, regarded Peirce's 1877-8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) as pragmatism
's foundation. Peirce (CP 5.11-12), like James saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes, in philosophy and elsewhere, elaborated into a new deliberate method of thinking and resolving dilemmas. Peirce differed from James and the early John Dewey
, in some of their tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in several senses of those terms, throughout the preponderance of his own philosophical moods.
In a 1906 manuscript, Peirce wrote that, in the Metaphysical Club decades earlier, Nicholas St. John Green
, agreed with Green. John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist
empiricism
as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation."
Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American
philosophy. As advocated by James, John Dewey
, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
, George Herbert Mead
, and others, it has proved durable and popular. But Peirce did not seize on this fact to enhance his reputation, and even coined the word "pragmaticism" to distinguish his philosophical position.
In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Peirce discusses three grades of clearness of conception:
By way of example of how to clarify conceptions, he addressed conceptions about truth and the real as questions of the presuppositions of reasoning in general. To reason is to presuppose (and at least to hope), as a principle of the reasoner's self-regulation, that the truth is independent of our vagaries of opinion and is discoverable. In clearness's second grade (the "nominal" grade), he defines truth as the correspondence of a sign (in particular, a proposition) to its object, and the real as the object (be it a possibility or quality, or an actuality or brute fact, or a necessity or norm or law) to which a true sign corresponds, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you or I or any actual, definite community of inquirers
think. After that needful but confined step, next in clearness's third grade (the pragmatic, practice-oriented grade) he defines truth — not as actual consensus, such that to inquire would be to poll the experts — but as that which would be reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research taken far enough, such that the real does depend on that ideal final opinion—a dependence to which he appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-run validity of the rule of induction. (Peirce held that one cannot have absolute theoretical assurance of having actually reached the truth, and later said that the confession of inaccuracy and one-sidedness is an essential ingredient of a true abstract statement.) Peirce argues that even to argue against the independence and discoverability of truth and the real is to presuppose that there is, about that very question under argument, a truth with just such independence and discoverability. For more on Peirce's theory of truth, see the Peirce section in Pragmatic theory of truth. Peirce's discussions and definitions of truth have influenced several epistemic truth theorists and been used as foil for deflationary
and correspondence
theories of truth.
Peirce said that a conception's meaning consists in "all general modes of rational conduct" implied by "acceptance" of the conception—that is, if one were to accept, first of all, the conception as true, then what could one conceive to be consequent general modes of rational conduct by all who accept the conception as true?—the whole of such consequent general modes is the whole meaning. His pragmatism, since a conception is general, does not equate a conception's meaning, its intellectual purport, with any definite set of actual consequences or upshots corroborating or undermining the conception or its worth, nor does it equate its meaning, much less its truth (if it is true), with the conceived or actual benefit or cost of the conception itself, like a meme (or, say, propaganda), outside the perspective of its being true in what it purports. If it is true, its truth is not transitory but instead immutable and independent of actual trends of opinion. His pragmatism also bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes a ruthless and Machiavellian search for mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce's pragmatic maxim is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification to test the truth of putative knowledge.
Peirce's pragmatism, as method and theory of definitions and the clearness of ideas, is a department within his theory of inquiry, which he variously called "Methodeutic" and "Philosophical or Speculative Rhetoric". He applied his pragmatism as a method throughout his work.
Peirce called his pragmatism "the logic of abduction
", that is, the logic of inference to explanatory hypotheses. As a method conducive to hypotheses as well as predictions and testing, pragmatism leads beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives, namely:
His approach is distinct from foundationalism
, empiricist or otherwise, as well as from coherentism
, by the following three dimensions:
A theory that proves itself more successful than its rivals in predicting and controlling our world is said to be nearer the truth. This is an operational notion of truth employed by scientists.
In "The Fixation of Belief", Peirce characterized inquiry in general not as the pursuit of truth per se but as the struggle to settle disturbances or conflicts of belief, irritating, inhibitory doubts, belief being that on which one is willing to act. That let Peirce frame scientific inquiry not only as a special kind of inquiry in a broader spectrum, but also, like inquiry generally, as based on actual doubts, not mere verbal doubts (such as hyperbolic doubt), which he held to be fruitless, and it let him also frame it, by the same stroke, as requiring that proof rest on propositions free from actual doubt, rather than on ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. He outlined four methods, ordered from least to most successful in achieving a secure fixation of belief:
Peirce held that, in practical affairs, slow and stumbling ratiocination is often dangerously inferior to instinct and traditional sentiment, and that the scientific method is best suited to theoretical research, which in turn should not be bound to the other methods and to practical ends; reason's "first rule" is that, in order to learn, one must desire to learn and, as a corollary, must not block the way of inquiry. What recommends the scientific method of inquiry above all others is that it is deliberately designed to arrive, eventually, at the ultimately most secure beliefs, upon which the most successful practices can eventually be based. Starting from the idea that people seek not truth per se but instead to subdue irritating, inhibitory doubt, Peirce shows how, through the struggle, some can come to submit to truth, seek as truth the guidance of potential practice correctly to its given goal, and wed themselves to the scientific method.
It is sometimes stated that James' and other philosophers' use of the word pragmatism so dismayed Peirce that he renamed his own variant pragmaticism. Susan Haack
has disagreed, pointing out the context in which Peirce publicly introduced the latter term in 1905. Haack's excerpt of Peirce begins below at the words "But at present...," and continues with some ellipses. The fuller excerpt below supports her case further:
Then, in a surviving draft letter to Calderoni, dated by the CP editors as circa that same year 1905, Peirce said regarding his above-quoted discussion:
Indeed in the Monist article Peirce had said that the coinage "pragmaticism" was intended "to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition". Of course this does not mean that Peirce regarded his fellow pragmatist philosophers as word-kidnappers. To the contrary he had said, regarding James's and Schiller's uses of the word "pragmatism": "So far, all went happily." So it would seem that Peirce intended the coinage "pragmaticism" for two distinguishable purposes: (1) protection from literary journals and word-kidnappers, and (2) reference strictly to his own form of pragmatism, as opposed even to other pragmatisms that had not moved him to the new name. In the letter to Calderoni, Peirce did not reject all significant affiliation with fellow pragmatists, and instead said "the rest of us". Nor did he reject all such affiliation in later discussions.
However, in the following year 1906, in a manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Peirce wrote:
(Peirce proceeded to criticize J. S. Mill but acknowledged probable aid from Mill's Examination.)
Then, in 1908, in his article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", mentioning both James and the journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini
, Peirce wrote:
Peirce proceeded in "A Neglected Argument" to express both deep satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists. He singled F.C.S. Schiller
out by name and was vague about which among the others he most particularly referred to. Peirce wrote "It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death...."
There has been some controversy over Peirce's relation to other pragmatists over the years and over the question of what is owed to Peirce, with visible crests in titles such as literary essayist Edward Dahlberg
's "Cutpurse Philosopher" about James, in which Dahlberg claimed that Peirce had "tombstone reticences" about making accusations, and Kenneth Laine Ketner's and Walker Percy
's A Thief of Peirce, in which Percy described himself as "a thief of Peirce" (page 130). Meanwhile, Schiller, James's wife Alice, and James's son Henry James III believed that James had a habit of overstating his intellectual debts to others such as Peirce.
In another manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critic" dated by the CP editors as 1911, Peirce discussed one of Zeno's paradoxes
, that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in terms of James's and others' difficulties with it. Peirce therein expressed regret at having used a "contemptuous" manner about such difficulties in his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (which James had arranged), and said of James, who had died in August 1910: "Nobody has a better right to testify to the morality of his attitude toward his own thoughts than I, who knew and loved him for forty-nine or fifty years. But owing to his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic — probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude — the gêne of its barbarous formulations, etc. rendered him an easy victim to Zeno and the Achilles....", called James "about as perfect a lover of truth as it is possible for a man to be...." and said: "In speaking, then, of William James as I do, I am saying the most that I could of any man's intellectual morality; and with him this was but one of a whole diadem of virtues."
Related pragmatism
Stipulative definition
A stipulative definition is a type of definition in which a new or currently-existing term is given a specific meaning for the purposes of argument or discussion in a given context. When the term already exists, this definition may, but does not necessarily, contradict the dictionary definition of...
from pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". Peirce in 1905 announced his coinage "pragmaticism", saying that it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (Collected Papers (CP) 5.414). Today, outside of philosophy, "pragmatism" is often taken to refer to a compromise of aims or principles, even a ruthless search for mercenary advantage. Peirce gave other or more specific reasons for the distinction in a surviving draft letter that year and in later writings. Peirce's pragmatism, that is, pragmaticism, differed in Peirce's view from other pragmatisms by its commitments to the spirit of strict logic, the immutability of truth, the reality of infinity, and the difference between (1) actively willing to control thought, to doubt, to weigh reasons, and (2) willing not to exert the will, willing to believe. In his view his pragmatism is, strictly speaking, not itself a whole philosophy, but instead a general method for the clarification of ideas. He first publicly formulated his pragmatism as an aspect of scientific logic along with principles of statistics
Founders of statistics
Statistics is the theory and application of mathematics to the scientific method including hypothesis generation, experimental design, sampling, data collection, data summarization, estimation, prediction and inference from those results to the population from which the experimental sample was drawn...
and modes of inference in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series of articles in 1877-8.
Pragmatic maxim
Whether one chooses to call it "pragmatismPragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
" or "pragmaticism"—and Peirce himself was not always consistent about it even after the notorious renaming—his conception of pragmatic philosophy is based on one or another version of the so-called "pragmatic maxim
Pragmatic maxim
The pragmatic maxim, also known as the maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism, is a maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce...
". Here is one of his more emphatic statements of it:
Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object (CP 5.438).
In the 1909 Century Dictionary
Century Dictionary
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by The Century Company of New York, in six, eight, or ten volume versions in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations...
Supplement, the entry for pragmaticism, written, it now appears, by John Dewey, was
pragmaticism (prag-mat′ i-sizm), n. [pragmatic + ism.] A special and limited form of pragmatism, in which the pragmatism is restricted to the determining of the meaning of concepts (particularly of philosophic concepts) by consideration of the experimental differences in the conduct of life which would conceivably result from the affirmation or denial of the meaning in question.He [the writer] framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life. . . . To serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism." C. S. Peirce, in The Monist, April, 1905, p. 166.
Pragmatism's origin
Pragmatism as a philosophical movement originated in 1872 in discussions in The Metaphysical ClubThe Metaphysical Club
The Metaphysical Club was a conversational philosophical club that future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., psychologist William James, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce formed in January 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and dissolved in December 1872. Upon Peirce's arrival at...
among Peirce, William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
, Chauncey Wright
Chauncey Wright
Chauncey Wright , American philosopher and mathematician, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts.In 1852 he graduated at Harvard, and became computer to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. He made his name by contributions on mathematical and physical subjects in the Mathematical Monthly...
, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot
Francis Ellingwood Abbot
Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method....
, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner. The first use in print of the name pragmatism appears to have been in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with having coined the name during the early 1870s.
James, among others, regarded Peirce's 1877-8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) as pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
's foundation. Peirce (CP 5.11-12), like James saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes, in philosophy and elsewhere, elaborated into a new deliberate method of thinking and resolving dilemmas. Peirce differed from James and the early John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, in some of their tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in several senses of those terms, throughout the preponderance of his own philosophical moods.
In a 1906 manuscript, Peirce wrote that, in the Metaphysical Club decades earlier, Nicholas St. John Green
often urged the importance of applying BainJames and Peirce, inspired by crucial links among belief, conduct, and dispositionAlexander BainAlexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism who was a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform...
's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism.
Disposition
A disposition is a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way.The terms dispositional belief and occurrent belief refer, in the former case, to a belief that is held in the mind but not currently being considered, and in the latter case, to a belief that is...
, agreed with Green. John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist
Fallibilism
Fallibilism is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world...
empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation."
Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosophy. As advocated by James, John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein , Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, and later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University...
, George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
, and others, it has proved durable and popular. But Peirce did not seize on this fact to enhance his reputation, and even coined the word "pragmaticism" to distinguish his philosophical position.
The clarification of ideas in inquiry
Pragmatism starts with the idea that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. Peirce's pragmatism is about conceptions of objects. His pragmatism is a method for fruitfully sorting out conceptual confusions caused, for example, by distinctions that make (sometimes needful) formal yet not practical differences. It equates any conception of an object with a conception of that object's effects to a general extent of those conceived effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. Those conceivable practical implications are the conception's meaning. The meaning is the consequent form of conduct or practice that would be implied by accepting the conception as true. Peirce's pragmaticism, in the strict sense, is about the conceptual elucidation of conceptions into such meanings — about how to make our ideas clear. Making them true, in the sense of proving and bearing them out in fruitful practice, goes beyond that. A conception's truth is its correspondence to the real, to that which would be found by investigation taken far enough. A conception's actual confirmation (if it occurs) is neither its meaning nor its truth per se, but an actual upshot.In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Peirce discusses three grades of clearness of conception:
- 1. Clearness of a conception familiar and readily used even if unanalyzed and undeveloped.
- 2. Clearness of a conception in virtue of clearness of its definition's parts, in virtue of which logicians called an idea distinct, that is, clarified by analysis of just what elements make the given idea applicable. Elsewhere, echoing Kant, Peirce calls such a definition "nominal" (CP 5.553).
- 3. Clearness in virtue of clearness of conceivable practical implications of the object's effects as conceived of, such as can lead to fruitful reasoning, especially on difficult problems. Here he introduces that which he later called the pragmatic maximPragmatic maximThe pragmatic maxim, also known as the maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism, is a maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce...
.
By way of example of how to clarify conceptions, he addressed conceptions about truth and the real as questions of the presuppositions of reasoning in general. To reason is to presuppose (and at least to hope), as a principle of the reasoner's self-regulation, that the truth is independent of our vagaries of opinion and is discoverable. In clearness's second grade (the "nominal" grade), he defines truth as the correspondence of a sign (in particular, a proposition) to its object, and the real as the object (be it a possibility or quality, or an actuality or brute fact, or a necessity or norm or law) to which a true sign corresponds, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you or I or any actual, definite community of inquirers
Community of inquiry
A community of inquiry is the social and educational context that leads to “questioning, reasoning, connecting, deliberating, challenging, and developing problem-solving techniques” as described by Matthew Lipman ....
think. After that needful but confined step, next in clearness's third grade (the pragmatic, practice-oriented grade) he defines truth — not as actual consensus, such that to inquire would be to poll the experts — but as that which would be reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research taken far enough, such that the real does depend on that ideal final opinion—a dependence to which he appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-run validity of the rule of induction. (Peirce held that one cannot have absolute theoretical assurance of having actually reached the truth, and later said that the confession of inaccuracy and one-sidedness is an essential ingredient of a true abstract statement.) Peirce argues that even to argue against the independence and discoverability of truth and the real is to presuppose that there is, about that very question under argument, a truth with just such independence and discoverability. For more on Peirce's theory of truth, see the Peirce section in Pragmatic theory of truth. Peirce's discussions and definitions of truth have influenced several epistemic truth theorists and been used as foil for deflationary
Deflationary theory of truth
A deflationary theory of truth is one of a family of theories which all have in common the claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement.-Redundancy theory:...
and correspondence
Correspondence theory of truth
The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world...
theories of truth.
Peirce said that a conception's meaning consists in "all general modes of rational conduct" implied by "acceptance" of the conception—that is, if one were to accept, first of all, the conception as true, then what could one conceive to be consequent general modes of rational conduct by all who accept the conception as true?—the whole of such consequent general modes is the whole meaning. His pragmatism, since a conception is general, does not equate a conception's meaning, its intellectual purport, with any definite set of actual consequences or upshots corroborating or undermining the conception or its worth, nor does it equate its meaning, much less its truth (if it is true), with the conceived or actual benefit or cost of the conception itself, like a meme (or, say, propaganda), outside the perspective of its being true in what it purports. If it is true, its truth is not transitory but instead immutable and independent of actual trends of opinion. His pragmatism also bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes a ruthless and Machiavellian search for mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce's pragmatic maxim is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification to test the truth of putative knowledge.
Peirce's pragmatism, as method and theory of definitions and the clearness of ideas, is a department within his theory of inquiry, which he variously called "Methodeutic" and "Philosophical or Speculative Rhetoric". He applied his pragmatism as a method throughout his work.
Peirce called his pragmatism "the logic of abduction
Abductive reasoning
Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as "guessing". The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true...
", that is, the logic of inference to explanatory hypotheses. As a method conducive to hypotheses as well as predictions and testing, pragmatism leads beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives, namely:
- DeductionDeductive reasoningDeductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypothesis...
from self-evident truths, or rationalismRationalismIn epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
;
- InductionInductive reasoningInductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
from experiential phenomena, or empiricismEmpiricismEmpiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
.
His approach is distinct from foundationalism
Foundationalism
Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified based on what are called basic beliefs . This position is intended to resolve the infinite regress problem in epistemology...
, empiricist or otherwise, as well as from coherentism
Coherentism
There are two distinct types of coherentism. One refers to the coherence theory of truth. The other refers to the coherence theory of justification. The coherentist theory of justification characterizes epistemic justification as a property of a belief only if that belief is a member of a coherent...
, by the following three dimensions:
- Active process of theory generation, with no prior assurance of truth;
- Subsequent application of the contingent theory in order to clarify its logical and practical implications;
- Testing and evaluation of the provisional theory's utility for the anticipationAnticipationAnticipation can refer to:* Anticipation , a 1971 album by Carly Simon* Anticipation , the title track of this album* Anticipation , a 2008 comedy album by Lewis Black*Anticipation...
of future experience, and that in dual senses of the word: predictionPredictionA prediction or forecast is a statement about the way things will happen in the future, often but not always based on experience or knowledge...
and control. Peirce's appreciation of these three dimensions serves to flesh out a physiognomyPhysiognomyPhysiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
of inquiry far more solid than the flatter image of inductive generalization simpliciter, which is merely the relabeling of phenomenological patterns. Peirce's pragmatism was the first time the scientific methodScientific methodScientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
was proposed as an epistemology for philosophical questions.
A theory that proves itself more successful than its rivals in predicting and controlling our world is said to be nearer the truth. This is an operational notion of truth employed by scientists.
In "The Fixation of Belief", Peirce characterized inquiry in general not as the pursuit of truth per se but as the struggle to settle disturbances or conflicts of belief, irritating, inhibitory doubts, belief being that on which one is willing to act. That let Peirce frame scientific inquiry not only as a special kind of inquiry in a broader spectrum, but also, like inquiry generally, as based on actual doubts, not mere verbal doubts (such as hyperbolic doubt), which he held to be fruitless, and it let him also frame it, by the same stroke, as requiring that proof rest on propositions free from actual doubt, rather than on ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. He outlined four methods, ordered from least to most successful in achieving a secure fixation of belief:
- The method of tenacity (policy of sticking to initial belief) — which brings comforts and decisiveness, but leads to trying to ignore contrary information and others' views, as if truth were intrinsically private, not public. The method goes against the social impulse and easily falters since one may well fail to avoid noticing when another's opinion is as good as one's own initial opinion. Its successes can be brilliant but tend to be transitory.
- The method of authority — which overcomes disagreements but sometimes brutally. Its successes can be majestic and long-lasting, but it cannot regulate people thoroughly enough to suppress doubts indefinitely, especially when people learn about other societies present and past.
- The method of congruity or the a priori or the dilettante or "what is agreeable to reason" — which promotes conformity less brutally, but depends on taste and fashion in paradigmParadigmThe word paradigm has been used in science to describe distinct concepts. It comes from Greek "παράδειγμα" , "pattern, example, sample" from the verb "παραδείκνυμι" , "exhibit, represent, expose" and that from "παρά" , "beside, beyond" + "δείκνυμι" , "to show, to point out".The original Greek...
s and can lead in circles over time, along with barren disputation. It is more intellectual and respectable but, like the first two methods, sustains capricious and accidental beliefs, destining some minds to doubts. - The method of science — the only one whereby inquiry can, by its own account, go wrong (fallibilismFallibilismFallibilism is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world...
), and purposely tests itself and criticizes, corrects, and improves itself.
Peirce held that, in practical affairs, slow and stumbling ratiocination is often dangerously inferior to instinct and traditional sentiment, and that the scientific method is best suited to theoretical research, which in turn should not be bound to the other methods and to practical ends; reason's "first rule" is that, in order to learn, one must desire to learn and, as a corollary, must not block the way of inquiry. What recommends the scientific method of inquiry above all others is that it is deliberately designed to arrive, eventually, at the ultimately most secure beliefs, upon which the most successful practices can eventually be based. Starting from the idea that people seek not truth per se but instead to subdue irritating, inhibitory doubt, Peirce shows how, through the struggle, some can come to submit to truth, seek as truth the guidance of potential practice correctly to its given goal, and wed themselves to the scientific method.
Pragmaticism's name
Susan Haack
Susan Haack is an English professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami in the United States. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism follows that of Charles Sanders Peirce.-Career:Haack is a graduate of the University of...
has disagreed, pointing out the context in which Peirce publicly introduced the latter term in 1905. Haack's excerpt of Peirce begins below at the words "But at present...," and continues with some ellipses. The fuller excerpt below supports her case further:
Then, in a surviving draft letter to Calderoni, dated by the CP editors as circa that same year 1905, Peirce said regarding his above-quoted discussion:
Indeed in the Monist article Peirce had said that the coinage "pragmaticism" was intended "to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition". Of course this does not mean that Peirce regarded his fellow pragmatist philosophers as word-kidnappers. To the contrary he had said, regarding James's and Schiller's uses of the word "pragmatism": "So far, all went happily." So it would seem that Peirce intended the coinage "pragmaticism" for two distinguishable purposes: (1) protection from literary journals and word-kidnappers, and (2) reference strictly to his own form of pragmatism, as opposed even to other pragmatisms that had not moved him to the new name. In the letter to Calderoni, Peirce did not reject all significant affiliation with fellow pragmatists, and instead said "the rest of us". Nor did he reject all such affiliation in later discussions.
However, in the following year 1906, in a manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Peirce wrote:
(Peirce proceeded to criticize J. S. Mill but acknowledged probable aid from Mill's Examination.)
Then, in 1908, in his article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", mentioning both James and the journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini
Giovanni Papini
Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist.-Early life:...
, Peirce wrote:
In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Mass., I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it "Pragmatism." In December 1877 and January 1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popular Science Monthly, and the two parts of my essay were printed in French in the Revue Philosophique, volumes vi. and vii. Of course, the doctrine attracted no particular attention, for, as I had remarked in my opening sentence, very few people care for logic. But in 1897 Professor James remodelled the matter, and transmogrified it into a doctrine of philosophy, some parts of which I highly approved, while other and more prominent parts I regarded, and still regard, as opposed to sound logic. About the time Professor Papini discovered, to the delight of the Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was incapable of definition, which would certainly seem to distinguish it from every other doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the conclusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another name; and accordingly, in April 1905, I renamed it Pragmaticism.
Peirce proceeded in "A Neglected Argument" to express both deep satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists. He singled F.C.S. Schiller
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein , Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, and later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University...
out by name and was vague about which among the others he most particularly referred to. Peirce wrote "It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death...."
Peirce remained allied with them about:
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but was dismayed with their "angry hatred of strict logic" and saw seeds of philosophical death in:
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There has been some controversy over Peirce's relation to other pragmatists over the years and over the question of what is owed to Peirce, with visible crests in titles such as literary essayist Edward Dahlberg
Edward Dahlberg
Edward Dahlberg was an American novelist, essayist and autobiographer. -Background:Edward Dahlberg was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Elizabeth Dahlberg. Together mother and son led a vagabond existence, until 1905 when she operated the Star Lady Barbershop in Kansas City...
's "Cutpurse Philosopher" about James, in which Dahlberg claimed that Peirce had "tombstone reticences" about making accusations, and Kenneth Laine Ketner's and Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
's A Thief of Peirce, in which Percy described himself as "a thief of Peirce" (page 130). Meanwhile, Schiller, James's wife Alice, and James's son Henry James III believed that James had a habit of overstating his intellectual debts to others such as Peirce.
In another manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critic" dated by the CP editors as 1911, Peirce discussed one of Zeno's paradoxes
Zeno's paradoxes
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides's doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is...
, that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in terms of James's and others' difficulties with it. Peirce therein expressed regret at having used a "contemptuous" manner about such difficulties in his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (which James had arranged), and said of James, who had died in August 1910: "Nobody has a better right to testify to the morality of his attitude toward his own thoughts than I, who knew and loved him for forty-nine or fifty years. But owing to his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic — probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude — the gêne of its barbarous formulations, etc. rendered him an easy victim to Zeno and the Achilles....", called James "about as perfect a lover of truth as it is possible for a man to be...." and said: "In speaking, then, of William James as I do, I am saying the most that I could of any man's intellectual morality; and with him this was but one of a whole diadem of virtues."
See also
- Charles Sanders Peirce bibliographyCharles Sanders Peirce bibliographyThis Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography consolidates numerous references to Charles Sanders Peirce's writings, including letters, manuscripts, publications, and Nachlass...
- Entitative graphEntitative graphAn entitative graph is an element of the diagrammatic syntax for logic that Charles Sanders Peirce developed under the name of qualitative logic beginning in the 1880's, taking the coverage of the formalism only as far as the propositional or sentential aspects of logic are concerned...
- Existential graphExistential graphAn existential graph is a type of diagrammatic or visual notation for logical expressions, proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote on graphical logic as early as 1882, and continued to develop the method until his death in 1914.-The graphs:...
- Hypostatic abstractionHypostatic abstractionHypostatic abstraction in mathematical logic, also known as hypostasis or subjectal abstraction, is a formal operation that transforms an assertion to a relation; for example "Honey is sweet" is transformed into "Honey has sweetness"...
- InquiryInquiryAn inquiry is any process that has the aim of augmenting knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem. A theory of inquiry is an account of the various types of inquiry and a treatment of the ways that each type of inquiry achieves its aim.-Deduction:...
- Logical graphLogical graphA logical graph is a special type of diagramatic structure in any one of several systems of graphical syntax that Charles Sanders Peirce developed for logic....
- Philosophy of mathematicsPhilosophy of mathematicsThe philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
- Philosophy of sciencePhilosophy of scienceThe philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
- Pragmatic maximPragmatic maximThe pragmatic maxim, also known as the maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism, is a maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce...
- Pragmatic theory of truthPragmatic theory of truthPragmatic theory of truth refers to those accounts, definitions, and theories of the concept truth that distinguish the philosophies of pragmatism and pragmaticism...
- Scientific methodScientific methodScientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
- SemeioticSemeioticSemeiotic is a spelling variant of a word used by Charles Sanders Peirce, likewise as "Semiotic," "Semiotics", and "Semeotic", to refer to his philosophical logic, which he cast as the study of signs, or semiotic. Some, not all, Peircean scholars have used "semeiotic" to refer to distinctly...
- Sign relationSign relationA sign relation is the basic construct in the theory of signs, also known as semeiotic or semiotics, as developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.-Anthesis:...
- Truth theory
External links
Peirce, including pragmatismRelated pragmatism
- Associazione Culturale Pragma with European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
- International Pragmatism Society. Journal: Contemporary Pragmatism, Mitchell Aboulafia & John R. Shook, Editors.
- Nordic Pragmatism Network, Henrik Rydenfelt (U. of Helsinki), coordinator. Journal: Nordic Studies in Pragmatism.
- Pragmatism Cybrary, David Hildebrand & John R. Shook, Editors.