In other fields
While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who create in these fields share a common inspiration, but their form is diverse and there are no received views.
In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific extend as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does non state that truth does not matter, but rather lets a specificto the impeach of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science.
One of modal logics is a effect in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this.
Another developing is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the working of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf Carnap. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement do not often refer to them.
Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the more celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements tautologies and contradictions whose truth or falsehood is a function of the meanings of the words in the total 'all bachelors are unmarried', and synthetic statements, whose truth or falsehood is a function of contingent states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that regarded and listed separately. meaningful or done as a reaction to a question gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which transmitted exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not a priori truths but synthetic statements.
Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of all of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary Linguistic communication philosophy. 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 leading 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 that he had criticized in Formal Logic. What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.
Whereas Schiller dismissed the opportunity of formal logic, almost pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension tovalidity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one mark of tools among others. this is the view of C. I. Lewis. C. S. Peirce developed companies methods for doing formal logic.
Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies although it is for an epistemological work.
James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is thetest and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should attempt to explain all that is assumption in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as thereality. Radical empiricism, or instant Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and proceeds instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.
William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:
[A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left slow you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with regarded and identified separately. other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. ... In ingredient of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it ... It is no description of our concrete universe
F. C. S. Schiller's number one book Riddles of the Sphinx was published ago he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These add free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would put God. On the other hand, summary metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality. While Schiller is vague approximately the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does assist in explanation.
In thehalf of the 20th century, ]
Radical empiricism gives answers to questions approximately the limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena.
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 representation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category.
Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question.[]
Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees notest of morality beyond what things for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the good reasons approach. The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such(a) as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle.
William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain measure of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when devloping moral decisions.
Moral questions immediately gave themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. ... A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because regarded and identified separately. member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many freelancer persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all cost on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.
Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three freelancer Factors in Morals", he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three give meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of clash among the three elements cannot always be easily solved.
Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself.
Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience. An extra implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them.
During the gradual 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by numerous in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering see designer baby garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for it development of a theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics. An anthology published by the MIT Press titled Pragmatic Bioethics included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others numerous of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several application of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.