pragmatism (philosophy of)

pragmatism (philosophy of) An influential and important, perhaps the central, North American philosophy. It rejects the quest for fundamental, foundational truths, and shuns the building of abstract philosophical systems. Instead, it suggests a plurality of shifting truths grounded in concrete experiences and language, in which a truth is appraised in terms of its consequences or usevalue. It is a down-to-earth philosophy, born in a period of rapid social change, which seeks to unify intelligent thought and logical method with practical actions and appeals to experience. William James, in his Pragmatism (1907), neatly summarizes the perspective when he states that ‘the Pragmatic method …is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?’

Pragmatism has sometimes been maligned as the philosophy of capitalism— since it has an apparent emphasis upon the ‘cash value’ of ideas. While differing significantly in emphasis, its key proponents are generally agreed to be the realists Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, and the nominalists William James and George Herbert Mead. It is identified with the Chicago School of sociology, and Paul Rock has argued (in The Making of Symbolic Interactionism, 1979) that it was important in shaping the theory of symbolic interactionism.