pragma

Pragmatism takes its name from Greek πρᾶγμα (pragma), meaning 'a deed, an act, a thing done,' from the verb πράσσειν (prassein), 'to do, to act, to accomplish.' The word entered philosophy through Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term pragmatism in the 1870s as the name for a principle of meaning-clarification: the meaning of any concept consists in the practical effects its object would have on experience. Peirce borrowed the Greek pragma deliberately — to think a thought through its consequences, to test a belief by what it does, was to ground philosophy in action rather than in abstract contemplation. Peirce initially called his principle the 'pragmatic maxim' and later, annoyed at the popularizations of his idea by William James, renamed his own version 'pragmaticism' — a word, he said memorably, 'ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.'

William James transformed Peirce's technical epistemological principle into a broad philosophical movement and a popular intellectual style in his lectures and writings from the 1890s onward. For James, pragmatism was a theory of truth as well as of meaning: a belief is true insofar as it 'works' — insofar as accepting it is useful for the believer, helps them navigate experience, satisfies practical needs. This was more radical than Peirce's original formulation and more controversial: it seemed to imply that a comforting religious belief could be 'true' simply because it helped people function, regardless of its correspondence to any independent reality. James's pragmatism was philosophically generous and psychologically acute, but it troubled those who wanted truth to be more than a function of usefulness.

John Dewey extended pragmatism into education, democracy, and social philosophy under the name 'instrumentalism' — his preferred term for the view that ideas are instruments for dealing with experience rather than mirrors of a pre-existing reality. Dewey's influence on American education in the first half of the twentieth century was enormous: the progressive education movement's emphasis on learning by doing, on problem-solving over rote memorization, on the student as an active agent rather than a passive recipient of transmitted knowledge, all derive from Dewey's pragmatist framework. The school as a democracy in miniature, preparing children for citizenship through practice rather than precept, was Dewey's vision. It was, and remains, deeply controversial.

Richard Rorty revived pragmatism in the late twentieth century as a form of anti-foundationalism — the rejection of the idea that philosophy should seek an Archimedean standpoint outside all perspectives from which to judge truth and value. Rorty drew on both the classical American pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger to argue that our vocabularies, concepts, and beliefs are tools for dealing with the world, not representations of its structure. There is no 'view from nowhere'; there is only this conversation, this tradition, these practices — and the pragmatist task is to improve them without pretending to judge them from outside. Rorty's 'neo-pragmatism' influenced literary criticism, political philosophy, and philosophy of science, though it was attacked with equal energy by those who thought its abandonment of truth was a dangerous relativism.