Pragmatism

Pragmatism as a school of philosophy arose in (and has remained for the most part confined [Page 1413]to) North America in the late 19th century. Pragmatism's most well-known and influential early theorists included Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Though not as well-known or widely appreciated internationally—or even within American academic philosophy—as many European philosophers, these “classical” American pragmatists continue to inform a diverse and evolving contemporary American pragmatism.

Perhaps most fundamentally, “all [pragmatists] agree in their rejection of foundationalist epistemology.” Pragmatist anti-foundationalism should not, however, be thought to reflect an antirealism or antinaturalism. The early pragmatists, particularly Peirce and Dewey, were intensely interested in theorizing the nature of scientific inquiry—in large part for the sake of the development of the practice(s) of natural science. For pragmatists, we must continue our scientific investigations into the “truths” of the world; but our explanations must proceed without recourse to a priori, unchanging “laws.” This emphasis on experience and experiment (and perhaps the near conflation of the two) “led James to call his philosophy ‘radical empiricism,’” according to Kelly Parker. All explanation is the product of experience, and experience has proven that our understandings of the world are nothing if not “fallible.”

The concept of “fallibilism”—originally theorized by Peirce—is also integral to pragmatism. Human beliefs are necessarily based in certain fundamental constructs. All such constructs—whether guiding natural science or social inquiry—are also necessarily fallible. We can never, in other words, assume that there is any transhistorical correctness underlying a particular concept of belief. Emphatically for pragmatists, however, this should not be construed to mean that no beliefs or constructs are correct or accurate. It is more that, as Larry Hickman puts it, “we may be able to get it [a belief or construct] better and better, truer and truer, but we never get it completely right” (emphasis added). “May” and “better” are primary qualifiers in this sentence. To anyone who would conflate the pragmatist optimism, inherent in this sentence, that “we may be able to get it…truer and truer,” with the Enlightenment “project” of the accumulation of knowledge increasingly nearing absolute Truth, it could be pointed out that we only ever know that we may be getting it truer. So there is a point in trying, a necessity for inquiry, to be sure, but it is unverifiable—and therefore a nonissue—to argue whether the development of any particular truth is approaching Truth. To staunch antimetaphysicalists (e.g., most poststructuralists) who might quarrel that “better and better, truer and truer,” still harbors an implication that there is a transhistorical end-state toward which we “think” we might be headed, the flat declaration that follows, that “we [know we] never get it completely right,” should sufficiently silence this charge.

Pragmatist anti-foundationalism and empiricism are thus based in a desire to explain and understand the world, but in a less epistemologically confident manner than as practiced within predominant modes of Western science.