As mentioned in a previous post, Pragmatism is, in large part, a method to identify truths. However, pragmatism does not seek after abstract truths but rather, instrumental truths. That is to say truths, which in practice, allow human beings to negotiate their varied, and often contradictory, experiences. Pragmatism holds that our “ideas (which are but parts of our experience) become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual shortcuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena.” Thus, “any idea which we can rid, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true insofar forth, true instrumentally. (James 1907)
Pragmatism, as a philosophical method, was introduced in 1878 by Charles Pierce and later formalized by William James between 1898 and 1907. As James explains: “the pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.” (James 1907) Unlike other philosophical methods that focus on abstract notions of truth, pragmatism “interpret[s] each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.” Pragmatism asserts: “whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.” Further, “to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance.” Thus, “to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object … we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve – what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.”
