Pragmatism

Conceptual Overview

Pragmatism is usually recognized as being founded through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, the latter two accrediting a debt to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A fourth pragmatist philosopher, George Herbert Mead, though not canonized to the same degree as Peirce, James, and Dewey, has had wide impact in the social sciences. Mead was one of the founders of social psychology and the originator of the symbolic interactionist movement. Many students of organizations have also been influenced by the linguistic pragmatism of Richard Rorty.

Pragmatism houses a number of theories and philosophies, some of which are conflicting. As a historical movement, it originated through discussions during the 1870s, most famously in what was known as the Metaphysical Club, an informal group of intellectuals usually meeting in the homes of Peirce and James in Cambridge. The discussion dealt with what was perceived as a string of problems in modern philosophy. Among them were positivist ideas about cumulative progress of science as a producer of absolute truths through objective representations of reality. The founders of pragmatism were antirepresentationalist, rejected absolute truth, and opposed a spectator theory of knowledge: there is no knowledge apart from the knower. These discussions gave rise to two distinct and interrelated streams of philosophical inquiry: theories of truth and theories of experience.

As a theory of truth, pragmatism rejects the separation between rational cognition and rational purpose. People's beliefs and knowledge cannot be separated from contexts of use and possibilities for action. The world is out there, but our knowledge of it is always interpretive and made by people to cope with the worlds in which they find themselves, what James called teleological weapons of the mind. Accordingly, there are no privileged descriptions of [Page 1299]reality that hold eternally, only conjectures from previous experiences to be tested in future experiences. Truth is provisional, always subject to fallibility by further inquiries. People do, however, have a right to believe in provisional truths according to their purposes in everyday life as well as in science. The progress of science is defined with respect to advances in the conceptual apparatus created by a particular community of inquirers engaged in particular purposes, not progressions toward final truth.

Pragmatist theories of truth are not unitary. So far, the instrumentalist version of truth, mostly associated with the work of James and Dewey, has been emphasized. Peirce, while also rejecting absolute certainty, advocated a consensus view of truth. The fundamental concern underlying his work was logic; that is, rules for rational inference. For Peirce, all inference is conducted through the use of symbols. This concern led him to study symbols, and Peirce was one of the founders of semiotics. Peirce also created the concept of abductive inference, which has later been called inference to the best explanation. In contrast to the classical inference forms of deduction and induction, a researcher engaged in abductive inference starts with a problem, considers a variety of explanations regarding the problem, eliminating them in an iterative process, finally fixing a belief. Peirce held that true beliefs are beliefs that are ultimately fated to be fixated—agreed to by the communities of inquirers that investigate them scientifically. Peirce was closer to the natural sciences than James and Dewey, and in his later writings Peirce renamed his approach pragmaticism to divorce it from a pragmatism he thought risked falling into forms of subjectivism, and thus be invulnerable to open criticism. This rift, one may say, arose from James's radical view of experience.

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