البراجماتية (انجليزى: Pragmatism; فرنساوى: Pragmatisme) هى مذهب فلسفى، حط مبادئه س. بيرس، و طورها وليام جيمس بيقيس صدق القضيه بنتايجها العمليه، لإن مفيش معرفه أولانيه فى العقل ممكن تستنبط منها نتايج صح، لكن الموضوع بيتوقف على نتايج التجربه الفعليه اللى بتحل للانسان مشاكله. البرجماتيين بيعتبروا ان الحق نسبى بيتقاس لزمن معين و مكان معين حسب التقدم العلمى.
Philosophy. A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles
S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.
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Philosophical movement first given systematic expression by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and later taken up and transformed by John Dewey. Pragmatists emphasize the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it. Pragmatism agrees with empiricism in its emphasis on the priority of experience over a priori reasoning. Whereas truth had traditionally been explained in terms of correspondence with reality or in terms of coherence ( coherentism), pragmatism holds that truth is to be found in the process of verification. Pragmatists interpret ideas as instruments and plans of action rather than as images of reality; more specifically, they are suggestions and anticipations of possible conduct, hypotheses or forecasts of what will result from a given action, or ways of organizing behaviour.
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Philosophy. A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles
S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.
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The philosophy of meaning and truth especially associated with Peirce and James. Pragmatism is given various formulations by both writers, but the core is the belief that the meaning of a doctrine is the same as the practical effects of adopting it. Peirce interpreted a theoretical sentence as a confused form of thought whose meaning is only that of a corresponding practical maxim (telling us what to do in some circumstance). In James the position issues in a theory of truth, notoriously allowing that beliefs, including for example belief in God, are true if the belief ‘works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word’. On James's view almost any belief might be respectable, and even true, provided it works (but working is not a simple matter for James). The apparently subjectivist consequences of this were wildly assailed by Russell, Moore, and others in the early years of the 20th century. This led to a division within pragmatism between those such as Dewey, whose humanistic conception of practice remains inspired by science, and the more idealistic route taken especially by the English writer F. C. S. Schiller (1864-1937), embracing the doctrine that our cognitive efforts and human needs actually transform the reality that we seek to describe. James often writes as if he sympathizes with this development. For instance, in The Meaning of Truth (1909), p. 189, he considers the hypothesis that other people have no minds (dramatized in the sexist idea of an ‘automatic sweetheart’ or female zombie) and remarks that the hypothesis would not work because it would not satisfy our (i.e. men's) egoistic cravings for the recognition and admiration of others. The implication that this is what makes it true that other persons (females) have minds is the disturbing part.
Peirce's own approach to truth is that it is what (suitable) processes of enquiry would tend to accept if pursued to an ideal limit. Modern pragmatists such as Rorty and in some writings Putnam have usually tried to dispense with an account of truth (see minimalism), and concentrate, as perhaps James should have done, upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief in the truth on the one hand must have a close connection with success in action on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects: they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine of the primacy of practical over pure reason, and continues to play an influential role in the theory of meaning and of truth. See also instrumentalism; logical positivism; Pascal's wager;
science, philosophy of; will to believe.
Peirce's own approach to truth is that it is what (suitable) processes of enquiry would tend to accept if pursued to an ideal limit. Modern pragmatists such as Rorty and in some writings Putnam have usually tried to dispense with an account of truth (see minimalism), and concentrate, as perhaps James should have done, upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief in the truth on the one hand must have a close connection with success in action on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects: they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine of the primacy of practical over pure reason, and continues to play an influential role in the theory of meaning and of truth. See also instrumentalism; logical positivism; Pascal's wager;
science, philosophy of; will to believe.
Pragmatism is the name given to a worldwide philosophic movement that was most important in the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Two centers of "classic" pragmatism existed in the United States. The one at the University of Chicago was led by John Dewey, who later taught at Columbia University in New York City, and included James H. Tufts, George Herbert Mead, and Addison W. Moore. The other had its nucleus at Harvard University and included Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce. Later in the twentieth century Harvard continued to be an influential stronghold of academic pragmatism, while New York City's intellectual life reflected Dewey's concerns. At the end of the twentieth century an important revival of pragmatism took place in scholarly disciplines outside of Philosophy.
Pragmatism arose as the most sophisticated attempt to reconcile science and religion in the wake of the widespread acceptance of Darwinian biology. The early pragmatists argued that the truth of an idea lay primarily in its ability satisfactorily to orient individuals to the world of which they were a part but also in its consistency with other ideas and its aesthetic appeal. Ideas were plans of action and would be deemed true if action in accordance with them "worked" in the long run. The pragmatists rejected what later became known as "representationalism," the belief that a true idea corresponded to its object. Truth was not a connection something mental had to something outside the mind but instead characterized a way of behaving. For the pragmatists, philosophers should not look for answers to speculative problems by cogitation in the library; rather, the practices of communities of inquirers should be explored. Accordingly the pragmatists accepted the findings and methods of the sciences and urged that their methods be applied in all areas of study. But they also thought that religious ideas, for example, belief in the existence of God and in a benign universe, might be justified if they had survival value.
Pragmatism At Harvard
In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," published in Popular Science Monthly in 1878, Peirce originally expressed these views in connection with the meaning of the concepts of the physical sciences. James's exposition was vigorously and forcefully popular, especially in his collected essays Pragmatism (1907). For James the chief virtue of the pragmatic account of truth was that it made philosophy concrete. James's position reflected his early interest in physiology and psychology, and he elaborated his insights in a long argument with his Harvard colleague Royce, who formulated a less-individualistic doctrine called "absolute pragmatism." Counting the emotional benefits of holding a belief to be true as part of the meaning of truth, James defended heartfelt spiritual creeds, and Peirce, calling his own views "pragmaticism," dissociated himself from James's nontechnical theorizing. James had an international reputation, and his support assisted in the promulgation of his ideas by F. C. Schiller in England, Henri Bergson in France, and Giovanni Papini in Italy.
Pragmatism At Chicago and Columbia
Steeped in the cultural thought of German idealism, Dewey used his version of pragmatism, called "instrumentalism," to attack educational, social, and political problems, as in The School and Society (1899) and Liberalism and Social Action (1935). Throughout Dewey's long and prolific career he was involved in controversy and led many liberal intellectual causes. His beliefs about "experimentalism" and the use of the "method of intelligence" in social life became the theoretical underpinning of the social sciences in the American university that of ten tilted against the status quo. A crude form of pragmatism became widely known as the rationale behind reformist politics: the political pragmatist was the liberal who restricted progressive goals to what was obtainable practically, to programs that could succeed.
A second period of pragmatism was under way when Dewey retired from teaching in 1929. In New York City a version of his system was propagated first of all by a younger group of "Columbia naturalists," including Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, and Herbert Schneider. For these thinkers intelligence grew out of a "natural" biological realm that yet provided an adequate locus for a moral and political life valuing humanism, social democracy, and internationalism. The naturalists also included among their allies Morris Cohen of the City College of New York, who sent generations of students to Columbia for graduate study; Dewey's student Sidney Hook, who articulately defended his mentor's ideas and pragmatism's public role from his position at New York University; and Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, who presided over an expansion of instrumentalist ideas in sociology and political science.
Later Pragmatisms
At Harvard the second period of pragmatism made Cambridge, Massachusetts, the premier place to study professional philosophy. A student of Royce and James, C. I. Lewis developed an epistemological system called "conceptual pragmatism." In his influential book of 1929, Mind and the World-Order, Lewis argued that the various frameworks of ideas by means of which people gained knowledge about the world were chosen on the basis of their practical value, but he emphasized the primacy of the hard sciences in obtaining knowledge. Over the next fifty years Lewis's academic writing was central to the "pragmatic analysts," the most significant group of American philosophers, Nelson Goodman, Willard Quine, and Hilary Putnam, all of whom subsequently taught at Harvard. These scholars and a host of lesser figures focused on logic and the philosophy of science. They intimated that humans lived in a Darwinian universe bereft of purpose and best explored by physics. At the same time they acknowledged that people selected conceptual structures with communal human purposes in mind and that of ten alternative structures were equally legitimate in accounting for the flux of experience and for attempts to navigate experience. A crucial explanation of these tension-laden concerns was laid out in Quine's celebrated essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," published in the Philosophical Re-view in 1951.
The Revival of Pragmatism
In the last quarter of the twentieth century pragmatic ideas remained alive in the work of the pragmatic analysts but had neither the religious nor social dimension of the more publicly accessible views of James or Dewey. In the discipline of philosophy in the United States classic pragmatism was considered an old-fashioned and unrefinedphilosophical commitment. Nonetheless at the end of the century a large-scale pragmatic renewal depended on the arguments of the analysts but also resurrected the concerns of classic figures.
These developments began with the extraordinary publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn, who had studied at Harvard and been influenced by Quine. Kuhn's thesis, that succeeding scientific worldviews were not progressive but incommensurable and thus to some degree relative, was ignored or patronized by many philosophers. Nonetheless his best-selling cross-disciplinary book was widely adopted by social scientists in a variety of disciplines, by departments of literature and the humanities generally, and by historians. It became common for many Kuhn-tinged thinkers to assert that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had proved beyond doubt that no ideas could be proved true.
In 1979, using the ideas of Quine and Kuhn, Richard Rorty published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which gave some philosophical support to Kuhn's relativistic ideas. But Rorty also linked them to the classic pragmatists, urging that human beings had different "discourses" available to them to attain whatever ends they might have, but no one discourse, including that of natural science, was privileged above the others. All were to be justified by their ability to lead expeditiously to the achievement of goals. Critics argued that such a "linguistic" pragmatism was less robust in its public implications than that of James and Dewey, a charge that Rorty both accepted in his commitment to private concerns and rebutted in writings that promoted the political side of his pragmatism. Rorty had an impact within the discipline of philosophy, but he was more connected to programs in humanities and comparative literature and was most generously read outside of the discipline of philosophy. He in any event had led the way to a revitalized pragmatic movement that regarded the classic thinkers as engaged in debates relevant to the twenty-first–century world.
Bibliography
Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Puts pragmatism in an international context.
Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2001. Most recent synthesis with a large section on pragmatism.
Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. The outstanding philosophical biography.
Stuhr, John J., ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Thayer, H. S. Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. A standard treatment.
Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1991. An excellent account of classic pragmatism.
Press, 1991. An excellent account of classic pragmatism.
pragmatism (prăg'mətĭzəm), method of philosophy in which the truth of a proposition is measured by its correspondence with experimental results and by its practical outcome. Thought is considered as simply an instrument for supporting the life aims of the human organism and has no real metaphysical significance. Pragmatism stands opposed to doctrines that hold that truth can be reached through deductive reasoning from a priori grounds and insists on the need for inductive investigation and constant empirical verification of hypotheses. There is constant protest against speculation concerning questions that have no application and no verifiable answers. Pragmatism holds that truth is modified as discoveries are made and is relative to the time and place and purpose of inquiry. In its ethical aspect pragmatism holds that knowledge that contributes to human values is real and that values play as essential a role in the choice of means employed in order to attain an end as they do in the choice of the end itself.
The philosophy was given its name by C. S. Peirce (c.1872), who developed the principles of pragmatic theory as formal doctrine. He was followed by William James, who held that in vital matters of faith the criterion for acceptance was the will to believe, and who was the key figure in promoting the widespread influence of pragmatism during the 1890s and early 1900s. John Dewey in his works developed the instrumentalist aspects of the doctrine. In Europe, F. C. S. Schiller (1864-1937) and others took up the theory. The succeeding generation of pragmatists included C. I. Lewis (1883-1964), whose conceptual pragmatism involves the application of Kantian principles to the investigation of empirical reality. W. V. O. Quine has upheld the validity of some a priori knowledge, pointing out that mathematics greatly facilitates scientific research. Richard Rorty has argued that theories are ultimately justified by their instrumentality, or the extent to which they enable people to attain their aims. Pragmatism dominated American philosophy from the 1890s to the 1930s and has reemerged as a significant element in contemporary thought.
Bibliography
See W. James, Pragmatism and Other Essays (ed. by R. B. Perry, 1965); A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism (1968); H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (1968, repr. 1981); C. Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (1970); R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982); D. S. Clarke,Rational Acceptance and Purpose: An Outline of a Pragmatist Epistemology (1989); L. Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader (1997) and The Metaphysical Club (2001); M. Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism (1999).
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A largely American philosophical tradition, too divergent in doctrine to constitute a school, which stresses the purposive nature of cognition and seeks in practical consequences the key to the meanings of concepts, or the correctness of belief. The term was coined by the philosopher C. S. Peirce, who applied it to a method, first published in 1878, for determining the meanings of 'intellectual concepts'. This method counselled us to consider the effects likely to have practical bearings which 'we conceive the object of our concept to have', for in those lie 'the whole of our conception of the object'. (Peirce thus anticipated verificationist themes which were to be prominent in quite different forms in logical positivism.) Peirce's method attracted the ready sympathy of his close friend William James, who wrote in 1879 that a conception 'is a teleological instrument ... a partial aspect of a thing which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing' (Principles of Psychology, ii. 335 n.).
Peirce, however, resisted the way James widened pragmatism to incorporate a theory of truth. This theory, which provoked intense controversy in the decades prior to the First World War, appeared to suggest that truth is nothing more than what works in practice. Doubtless James's vivid way of expressing his views (speaking of 'cash value' and of truths as having in common only the quality 'that they pay') contributed to the tendency of his opponents to father on him hopelessly crude views; but it remains exceedingly difficult to extract a coherent theory of truth from James's writings. The reason may be that truth as we commonly use the notion points to a divorce of cognition from purposive activity, so that a pragmatic spirit is best developed by leaving the notion of truth behind. This was the path taken by John Dewey (e.g. in his Logic of 1938), who abandoned the notion of truth in favour of 'warranted assertibility'.
Peirce, however, resisted the way James widened pragmatism to incorporate a theory of truth. This theory, which provoked intense controversy in the decades prior to the First World War, appeared to suggest that truth is nothing more than what works in practice. Doubtless James's vivid way of expressing his views (speaking of 'cash value' and of truths as having in common only the quality 'that they pay') contributed to the tendency of his opponents to father on him hopelessly crude views; but it remains exceedingly difficult to extract a coherent theory of truth from James's writings. The reason may be that truth as we commonly use the notion points to a divorce of cognition from purposive activity, so that a pragmatic spirit is best developed by leaving the notion of truth behind. This was the path taken by John Dewey (e.g. in his Logic of 1938), who abandoned the notion of truth in favour of 'warranted assertibility'.
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