Pragmatism — From the Greek prâgma (deed, thing done, affair). A philosophical tradition born in the United States in the late nineteenth century that gauges the meaning and truth of ideas, concepts, and theories by their practical consequences rather than by any supposed correspondence to a fixed reality. Charles Sanders Peirce formulates the so-called “pragmatic maxim” (How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878): the meaning of a concept consists entirely in the conceivable practical effects we ascribe to its object — to think something “hard,” for instance, is to predict that it will resist being scratched. William James popularizes and radicalizes the view in Pragmatism (1907): truth is not a static property but something that “happens” to an idea insofar as it “works” (what works), guiding us successfully through experience. John Dewey shifts the emphasis to method and develops instrumentalism: thought is an instrument for solving problems, and inquiry is the process that transforms an indeterminate, problematic situation into a determinate, settled one — a view with a lasting impact on his philosophy of education. Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) abandons the search for ultimate foundations and denies that the mind is a “mirror of nature,” redefining philosophy as a conversation among useful vocabularies. Pragmatism thus stands close to instrumentalism and contrasts directly with the correspondence theory of truth central to traditional epistemology.
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