|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||
|
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Select: Introduction: Pragmatism, Instrumentalism - Charles Sanders Peirce - William James |
|
|
Pragmatism: Pragmatism is a philosophical movement, developed in the United States, which holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea is a function of its practical outcome. Fundamental to pragmatism is a strong antiabsolutism: the conviction that all principles are to be regarded as working hypotheses rather than as metaphysically binding axioms. A modern expression of empiricism, pragmatism was highly influential in America in the first quarter of the 20th century. Pragmatism has tended to criticize traditional philosophical outlooks in the light of scientific and social developments. Charles Sanders Peirce is considered the founder of pragmatism, although later he changed the name of his philosophical position to "pramaticism." He developed it as a theory of meaning in the 1870s, holding that an intrinsic connection exists between meaning and action -- that the meaning of an idea is to be found in its "conceivable sensible effects" and that humans generate belief through their "habits of action." William James gave a further direction to pragmatism, developing it as a theory of truth. True ideas, according to James, are useful "leadings"; they lead through experience in ways that provide consistency, orderliness, and predictability. John Dewey was another leading pragmatist whose influence on educational and social theory is still prevalent in American society. Instrumentalism: This refers to John Dewey's criticism of the traditional notions of truth which is embodied in his theory of instrumentalism, which he defines as "an attempt to constitute a precise logical theory of concepts, judgments and inferences in their various forms, by primarily considering how thought functions in the experimental determinations of future consequences." Dewey made inquiry, rather than truth or knowledge, the essence of logic.
In a paper on "How To Make Your Ideas Clear," contributed to the Popular Science Monthly in 1878, Charles Sanders Peirce first used the word pragmatism to designate a principle put forward by him as a rule for guiding the scientist and the mathematician. The principle is that the meaning of any conception in the mind is the practical effect it will have in action. The rule remained unnoticed for twenty years, until it was taken up by Professor William James in the address he delivered at the University of California in 1898. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) Charles Sanders Peirce (picture), a philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 10, 1839. He was the founder of the pragmatic movement in American philosophy. Son of the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce, he attended Harvard and the Lawrence Scientific School, receiving a degree in chemistry in 1863. At Harvard he met William James, who later developed and popularized pragmatism. Peirce worked as an astronomer at the Harvard Observatory and as a physicist for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, at the same time pursuing his interests in philosophy. He taught briefly at Harvard and then at The Johns Hopkins University. Overview Peirce was a distinguished physicist, a scholar of erudition and originality. He borrowed the term "pragmatic" from Kant, and later William James took it over from Peirce. Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason, used the term pragmatic to distinguish technique derived from and applicable to experience from those which he regarded as prior to or logically independent of experience (a priori principles). It should be noted that Peirce invented the term pragmaticism in his later years to differentiate his position from that of William James. Peirce regards pragmatism as a method of clarifying conceptions. His basic principle is that the meaning of ideas is best discovered by putting them to an experimental test and then observing the consequences. He was especially interested in methodological procedure as evidenced in laboratory science. He maintained that the testing of hypotheses by laboratory experimentation will produce a definite type of experience. Hence the complete definition of any concept is the totality of the experimental occurrences implied in that concept by logical meaning. Doctrine Until William James turned to philosophy and made pragmatism popular, his lifelong friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, the initiator of this movement, had been almost unknown. As the founder of American pragmatism, Peirce developed a criterion of meaning in terms of conceivable effects or consequences in experience and a view of beliefs as "habits of action." His metaphysics embraces a theory of cosmic evolution and a theory of causal laws. He also wrote extensively on logic, epistemology, scientific method, cosmology, semiotics, and mathematics and more briefly on aesthetics, religion, phenomenology, and history. He had had no time to complete a book, except his Grand Logic which, however, was published after his death, together with other works he had left. Before men like James and Dewey made Peirce's name famous, he could state: "I am a man of whom critics never found anything good to say." But once he was rather happy to be blamed by a malicious critic who reproached him for not being sure of his own conclusions. Peirce regarded this reproof as a praise. For to him any truth is provisional. In any proposition there must be taken account of coefficient of probability. This theory, called by Peirce "fallibilism," is a substitute for skepticism, and a constituent of his philosophical system, of no lesser importance than pragmatism, which he substitutes for positivism. Before he concentrated upon philosophical studies, Peirce had worked for ten years in chemical laboratories, and had been devoted to the exact sciences. He was, by nature, a logician, and it was his interest in logic that made him a philosopher. His conception of pragmatism was not a metaphysical but a logical theory. After studying German and English philosophies, Peirce declared that the Germans acquainted him with "a rich mine of suggestions," which were "of little argumentative weight," while the results of the British were "meager but more accurate." Peirce was an active member of the "Metaphysical Club," where he met such thinkers as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, and William James. In 1878 he wrote an article, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," published in the Popular Science Monthly, and formulated his ideas on pragmatism, his new approach to philosophy. His main interest, however, was logic, in which he followed A. de Morgan and G. Boole, and he developed the logic of relations and made important contributions to other fields of modern logic. And he also anticipated the discoveries of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in their Principia Mathematica. Peirce's pragmatism, though a logical theory, interprets thought in terms of operation and control. Its striking feature is the inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose. The whole function of thinking, says Peirce, is but one step in the production of habits of action. His statement of the close relation between thought and human conduct has often been misunderstood as though Peirce had proclaimed subordination of reason to action, or even to profit and particular interests. In fact, Peirce defined the meaning of a concept or proposition as that form which is most directly applicable to self-control in any situation and to any purpose. To him, the rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future which is regarded as the ultimate test of what truth means. Peirce's professional life was not all that successful. Quite capable of scientific and philosophic writing, he seemed to shun topics of general interest and alienated publishers. His projects of extensive writing invariably met with cold response and eventually came to naught; his publications were limited almost entirely to book reviews. But he continued to write voluminously and to revise his unpublished manuscripts. Charles Sanders Peirce died poor, in despair and unrecognized, on April 19, 1914. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
William James (picture) was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, and was one of the founders and leading proponents of pragmatism. He was the son of philosopher Henry James, Sr., and brother of novelist Henry James. He attended schools in Europe and in 1861 entered Harvard College. He received his degree 3 years later and began studies at Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, he was a member of "The Metaphysical Club," an informal group that met to discuss philosophy and included Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Chauncey Wright, all of whom were to become well known in the pragmatist movement. William James is generally considered not only the most influential of all American philosophers but the very representative of American thought. However, the results of his thinking are by no means confined to his native country, and his background is anything but exclusively American. Very few American families maintained such intimate contact with Europe as did Henry James, Sr., a theologian and philosophical writer, and a great amateur of wide culture, and his sons William and Henry, the great novelist, who, on his part, was more at home in France and England than in the land of his birth. After receiving his medical degree, James suffered a period of illness, but in 1873 he was able to accept an appointment as instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard. Two years later he began teaching psychology, and in 1879, philosophy. James remained at Harvard, with only a few interruptions in his academic career, until his resignation in 1907. The works of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were important influences in James's early thinking; Henri Bergson was important both personally and philosophically in his later years, as was John Dewey, who carried on the leadership of the pragmatist movement after James' death. In his youth, William James desired to become known as a painter. But, while living with art, he learned that he could live without art, and turned to medicine and the natural sciences. However, his early study of painting was no labor lost. On the contrary, James derived from it his pictorial manner of philosophizing, which does not involve picturesqueness of style but rather his talents for conveying the present aspect of a situation, for finding immediate joy in the variety of appearances from which he proceeded to enjoy the various psychic experiences, while being capable of describing them in scientific terms, coined afresh, without much regard to traditional terminology. Such blending of scientific sagacity with artistic sensibility, such psychological perspicacity, enriched and refined by his previous study of art, and disciplined by scientific training, are characteristics of James' brilliant lectures and writing, and the cause of his great success. His gifts became known to the public in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology appeared, marking a new period in this special branch of science and foreshadowing his turn to philosophy. It was the latent artist in James that made his treatment of moral, epistemological, and metaphysical problems a revolt of the spirit of immediate concrete experience against the intellectualistic idealism. James' radical empiricism maintains the plurality of the real units of which, according to him, experience consists, against any harmonizing or simplifying monism. Pragmatism, as James defines his empiricism, has become of immense consequence in modern thinking. Doctrine In his famous work The Principles of Psychology (1890), James developed the view, in opposition to the more traditional associationism, that consciousness functions in an active, purposeful way to relate and organize thoughts, giving them a streamlike continuity. In the history of psychology, James' theory of mind is called functionalism. James had established an international reputation in psychology before his main focus turned to philosophy, and many of his philosophical views have their roots in his psychological studies. James elaborated his theory of pragmatism in works such as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909). He considered pragmatism to be both a method for analyzing philosophic problems and a theory of truth. He also saw it as an extension of the empiricist attitude in that it turned away from abstract theory and fixed or absolute principles and toward concrete facts, actions, and relative principles. James considered philosophies to be expressions of personal temperament and developed a correlation between "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" temperaments and empiricist and rationalist positions in philosophy. Theories, he felt, are "instruments" that humans use to solve problems and should be judged in terms of their "cash value" or practical consequences for human conduct. He developed the notion of truth as a "leading" that is useful: it can change as human experience changes. The morality, as well as the truth, of an idea or action should be judged, according to James, in a similar way -- in terms of its outcome in human experience. In The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James examined the problem of belief in cases in which no immediate evidence exists on which to base one's belief. He concluded that in the area of religious commitment, belief can create its own truth through the effects created in the experience of the believer by his "willing nature." Belief in God is thus pragmatically justified if it makes a positive difference in the experience of the believer. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), James developed his metaphysical position: there is no fixed external world to be discovered by one's mind but instead a "humming-buzzing confusion" that one organizes through experience. The universe, as well as one's knowledge of it, is continuously evolving. Never complete, it cannot be reduced to a single underlying substance. James surpasses Hume by denying consciousness. He acknowledges a stream of experiences but not a stream of conscious experiences. Therewith he denies that in knowledge the relation between the knowing subject and the object to be known is fundamental, which almost all modern philosophers had taken for granted. This denial has induced many contemporary philosophers, though opposed to James' views, to reconsider the bases and starting points of their own thoughts. Summary Neither materialistic nor spiritualistic monism satisfied William James. The individual is a mere puppet in the hands of absolute substance, be it universal matter or universal mind. The test of a theory, belief, doctrine, must be its effect upon us, its practical consequences -- the pragmatic test: whatever works is true. The possession of truth is not an in itself but a preliminary means to vital satisfaction. Knowledge is an instrument for the sake of life, existing as practical utility. True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. Truth is, therefore, useful because it is true, it is true because it is useful. James' empiricism opposes classical rationalism and traditional empiricism. He denies that whatever is rational is real. To reach reality we must take experience as it exists before it has been manipulated by conceptual thinking. Reality is the flux of our sensations coming from what we know not. It is the totality of consciousness, experience permeated with thought. Reality is ever in the making, growing where thinking beings are at work. Radical empiricism (James) makes for pluralism, multiplicity, diversity, opposition either in quantity or quality. Pluralism satisfies man's moral nature, recognizes individual perceptions. It is melioristic; if each man will do his best, the universe cannot fail. In such a world man is free to seek his ideal. James' psychology gives foundation to his empiricism. Consciousness is active and a unity. It is selective and teleological. It carves out man's world. The will, by making a strong idea focal to the exclusion of others, fills the mind and prepares for action. The intellect isolates and integrates "things," imputes reality to them, through the emotional and active life, and conceives them pragmatically. The unity of consciousness is thorough connectedness, a flowing stream, "substantive" parts shading into one another through the "transitive" parts, surrounded by a "fringe" or "feeling of tendency." James' writing is characterized by a lucid, easily readable style, and he has had a wide popular readership. He died on August 26, 1910. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
To Page 2 of American Pragmatism Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Magazine...
|
|
|
Introduction & Directory |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, & 2002-03 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.
This Page Was Updated On