To resist dogma and accept uncertainty, think like a pragmatist

Founded in 19th-century America, the philosophy of pragmatism promises imaginative ways of coping with our circumstances

https://psyche.co/ideas/to-resist-dogma-and-accept-uncertainty-think-like-a-pragmatist


Montana, USA; 2000. Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum



In the everyday sense of the term, the pragmatist is the person who ‘gets results’. The term can be intended as either a compliment or a criticism; it can be applied equally to effective and to unscrupulous managers and politicians. These connotations carry over, typically in misleading ways, into the philosophical sense of pragmatism.

Pragmatism is the United States’ most important contribution to philosophy, emerging in the late 19th century, developing throughout the 20th, and flourishing today. At its heart is a rejection of what one of its founders, John Dewey (1859-1952), calls ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’. This theory, which can be traced to Plato, holds that reality is composed of two discrete entities: the world of objects, which exist independently of us, and the minds, which perceive and seek accurately to represent that world. In the alternative account offered by pragmatists, the mind is, rather, a part of the world, in which it plays an active role. Pragmatists, accordingly, describe us not as seeking to represent reality as it exists independently of us, but rather as developing more effective and imaginative ways of coping with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Pragmatists take up some of the questions that have been central to the Western philosophical tradition: what is truth? What is objectivity? How might these be discovered or achieved? How should our political and social lives be structured? They find answers not in some supposedly transcendental realm, but as growing out of and remaining firmly rooted in our concrete dealings with the world. In the words of another of its founders, William James (1842-1910): ‘The trail of the human serpent is … over everything.’

Pragmatism offers answers to many of the questions that have interested philosophers since Plato. There is, though, no single programme or set of tenets around which every pragmatist unites, and the tradition contains very different and sometimes conflicting ideas. In what follows, I set out some ideas that I think are particularly useful.

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