What Is Pragmatism? The Philosophy That Asks What Difference It Makes

The starting point is a paper by Charles Sanders Peirce published in 1878, which set out what he called the pragmatic maxim: to determine the meaning of a concept, consider what practical effects the object of the concept would have, since the whole of our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. Peirce was a working scientist, a logician and a surveyor for the coastal survey, and his target was the metaphysical speculation he thought consisted of words with no cash value in experience. Calling something hard means it will not be scratched by many substances; if two theories of hardness predict identical scratch tests, they say the same thing. He paired this with a fallibilist account of enquiry, in which belief is the settled state that lets us act and doubt is the irritation that starts investigation, and truth is what the community of enquirers would converge on in the long run if enquiry continued indefinitely.

William James, a psychologist and the brother of the novelist, popularised the idea in the 1900s and broadened it in a way that Peirce disliked so much that he renamed his own position pragmaticism, choosing a word he said was ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. James applied the maxim to truth itself, proposing that a belief is true insofar as it works, meaning that holding it leads to successful prediction and action and to consistency with the rest of what we believe. He extended this to religion, arguing in a famous lecture that where a question cannot be settled by evidence and the choice is genuine and forced, a person is entitled to believe on the basis of what the belief does for them. This produced the standard objection, that pragmatism licenses believing comfortable falsehoods, and the standard reply, that a belief that is false will eventually fail to work, since reality pushes back. Whether that reply is adequate has been argued ever since.

John Dewey took the approach out of the seminar room and applied it across a sixty-year career:

• •Enquiry, in his account, always begins in an indeterminate situation and aims to resolve it, so thinking is a form of doing rather than a spectator's activity
• •Knowledge is therefore instrumental, a tool for transforming situations, and the traditional split between theory and practice is a mistake
• •Education must be experiential: children learn by doing and by solving real problems, a claim that reshaped schooling in the twentieth century and is still argued about
• •Democracy is not a mechanism for aggregating preferences but a form of associated living and shared enquiry, and its justification is that no other arrangement lets a society learn from its mistakes
• •Ethics involves no fixed ends, only problems worked out in context, which is why he resisted both rule-based and consequence-based systems

Three criticisms recur. The first is that the theory of truth collapses into relativism, since what works for one person or culture may not work for another, and the pragmatist reply that reality constrains what works is only as strong as the account of that constraint. The second, pressed by Bertrand Russell, is that it confuses truth with the usefulness of believing, and that a belief can be useful and false or true and useless, a point that seems obvious until one tries to specify what truth would consist in independently of any possible evidence, which is exactly what the pragmatist denies is available. The third is that the position is anti-intellectual, replacing the search for how things are with a concern for what pays, which its defenders regard as a misreading, since Peirce's whole framework is built on scientific method and long-run convergence. The movement also fell out of fashion in mid-century as analytic philosophy, formal logic and logical positivism took over the American academy, and for thirty years it was treated as a historical episode.

It came back from the 1970s, largely through Richard Rorty, who combined pragmatism with a critique of the idea that the mind mirrors an independent reality and argued that we should abandon the search for a foundation to knowledge and treat vocabularies as tools to be judged by what they let us do. Hilary Putnam and others developed a more moderate version that keeps a realist commitment. The influence outside philosophy is wide and often unlabelled: legal realism and the American approach to interpreting law by consequences descend from it, as does much of instrumentalist thinking in the philosophy of science, and Dewey's account of learning by enquiry runs through modern education theory. The maxim itself has become a general intellectual habit, appearing whenever someone asks of a disagreement what would actually be different if one side were right, which is a question that ends more arguments than it starts.

Peirce proposed in 1878 that the meaning of a concept is exhausted by the practical consequences of the thing it names, so that two beliefs leading to identical expectations are one belief. James extended the test to truth, holding that a belief is true insofar as it works, which drew the charge of licensing comfortable falsehoods. Dewey applied the framework to enquiry, education and democracy, treating thinking as problem-solving. The movement faded mid-century and returned from the 1970s through Rorty and Putnam.