Pragmatism is a philosophic school generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with
Charles Peirce, who first stated the
pragmatic maxim. It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of
William James and
John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as
pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and
truth. Other important aspects of pragmatism include
anti-Cartesianism,
radical empiricism,
instrumentalism,
anti-realism,
verificationism,
conceptual relativity, a denial of the
fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and
fallibilism.
Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention from the 1950s on, because of a new school of philosophers who put forth a revised pragmatism that criticized the logical positivism that had dominated philosophy in the United States and Britain since the 1930s, notably in the work of analytic philosophers like W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Their naturalized epistemology was further developed and widely publicized by Richard Rorty, whose later work grew closer to continental philosophy and is often considered relativistic. Contemporary pragmatism is still divided between those thinkers who work strictly within the analytic tradition, and a more relativistic strand in the wake of Rorty and lastly neoclassical pragmatists like Susan Haack who stay closer to the work of Peirce, James and Dewey.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s. The thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced /'p?s/) and William James (both members of The Metaphysical Club) as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead figured most prominently in its overall direction. The term pragmatism was first used in print by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. Prompted by James' use of the term and its attribution to him, Peirce began writing and lecturing on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. Peirce eventually coined the new name pragmaticism to mark what he regarded as the original idea, for clarity's sake and possibly (but not certainly) because he disagreed with James (cf. Menand 2001 on the former interpretation; below on the latter). He claimed that the term was so ugly, nobody would be tempted to steal it (Haack 1998).
James and Peirce were inspired by several earlier thinkers, notably Alexander Bain, who examined the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying that a belief is a proposition on which a person is prepared to act. Earlier thinkers that inspired the pragmatists include Francis Bacon who coined the phrase "knowledge is power", David Hume for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action, Thomas Reid for his direct realism, Immanuel Kant for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name "pragmatism", Georg Hegel for his introduction of temporality into philosophy (Pinkard in Misak 2007), and J.S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism.
