Enrique asked:

What exactly is pragmatism? How is it different from other philosophical currents?

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Originally Pragmatism was intended as a method for clarifying the meaning of our concepts, through
examining the practical effects of the use of the concepts. Then through the works of William James
Pragmatism became known as a theory of truth, where the criterion of the truth of a belief was the
usefulness or expediency of the belief.

Today however, pragmatism can be seen as an attempt to talk about philosophical issues and
problems in a different way than they are traditionally approached. There are a number of methods
adopted by pragmatists in order to do this, but these methods are not unique or exclusive to
pragmatism and it is interesting to see where pragmatism shared insights with such philosophers as
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida.

But Iet's concentrate here on the motivations pragmatists have in wanting to dissolve traditional
philosophical problems.

From it's earliest days, beginning with C.S. Peirce, there has been resistance to the systems of Plato,
Descartes and the seemingly intractable issues raised by them, such as the distinctions between
appearance and reality, the subjective and the objective, facts an values, knowledge and scepticism.
Pragmatists do not like these dualisms, and don't even like to set the problems of philosophy in terms
of these distinctions. They would sooner get rid of this way of looking at things and to use Rorty's
terms 'develop more useful Vocabularies'.

Why? Because these dualisms are according to pragmatists out of date, ambiguous, obscure,
unuseful and perhaps even dangerous — in that they hinder proper progress. Pragmatists want to
persuade us to stop thinking of the problems of philosophy in this way. This is because of the
importance Pragmatists place on the Primacy of Practice. The way we use beliefs and facts in order
to get by in the world.

Going back to the traditional problems of philosophy, there is a distinction between theory and
practice, between knowing something and doing something. We can know something about the world
without actually being in the world. From here it is possible to draw another distinction that gets us
into trouble: we can, for example, imagine that the world is different from what we actually think we
know about it. This is the appearance/ reality distinction, which can lead to scepticism. And that is
generally considered to be a bad position to be in.

However for the pragmatists there is no distinction between theory and practice. Beliefs and
knowledge are put to work, we use them to negotiate in and around the world. We call a belief true
and gain knowledge when the beliefs we have successfully work in that we are able to achieve our
aims and purposes. Therefore there is no distinction between facts and values either, because what
aims we have, what we find useful and good will determine what facts and truths there will be in the
world. This also means we can avoid scepticism.

Scepticism means that if we have reason to doubt any one of our beliefs we also have reason to
doubt them all. We could never be certain any of our beliefs were true and we could not know
anything. For Pragmatists however, doubt requires as much justification as belief, the reason we
come to doubt one of our beliefs is if it fails to perform well in helping us in our purposes. We call a
belief false when it is unuseful But this does not mean we have to call into question the validity of our
entire set of beliefs. Instead of scepticism, pragmatism is characterised by its appeal to Fallibilism. It
is also a form of Holism, preferring a. coherence theory of justification of beliefs rather than a
correspondence theory as found in Plato and Descartes.

So we have some idea of the defining characteristics of pragmatism. First there is the importance of
the primacy of practice in explaining notions of truth and reality and the possibility of knowledge.
Pragmatism also denies that there is a distinction between facts and values. It is anti-sceptical and
adopts fallibilism. But there are connections here with what Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein say,
and these philosophers are not usually referred to as pragmatists, so what is the difference between
pragmatists and these others? I think it is an interesting question and not a simple one, because of
the influences they have on each other. However I think we would have to say that it is the Primacy of
practice that separates pragmatism from it's close relations, the idea that what is useful for us will
influence what truths there will be.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield