Pragmatism

Date Created: 24 Jun 2026

Last Updated: 24 Jun 2026

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Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. C.S. Peirce, the Pragmatic Maxim as stated in How to make our ideas clear

[…] ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience […] William James, What Pragmatism Means (Lecture II of the Pragmatism Lectures, collected in Pragmatism and Other Writings)

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. Catherine Legg and Christopher Hookway, Pragmatism (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Pragmatism is a varied and variable philosophical tradition very loosely united by an interest in the meaning or truth of beliefs as defined by their consequences. Its origins are in several discussions at the ‘Metaphysical Club’ in Harvard in 1870 when C.S. Peirce developed his key ideas (Legg and Hookway 2024). Peirce then developed these ideas across several publications, of which the key paper is How to make our ideas clear in which he coined the Pragmatic Maxim. This basically says that our conception of the effects an object has is our conception of the object. Implicitly, if two concepts of the same thing share identical consequences, then this maxim states that there is no different between these concepts. Pragmatism here is an account of meaning.

James popularised Pragmatism, citing Peirce’s maxim, but also characterising it as a theory of truth. The mainstream theory of truth in philosophy is the correspondence theory of truth, where my belief is true to the extent it corresponds to reality. In James’ pragmatist concept of truth, a belief is true insofar as it is practically useful. For me, this begs the question of what makes a belief useful. Where I’m at at the moment is that correspondence is a criterion of usefulness when it comes to physical reality, but in domains such as ethics there is nothing for our beliefs to correspond to. But we can say that, say, certain political systems are preferable because they produce more equitable outcomes. I’m not sure I’d call this truth so much as justification, but I think it shows that the death of God and the absence of an absolute truth in morality need lead to relativism.

In this thought I’m drawing on Rorty’s rather more radical account of pragmatism, though not quite giving it full-throated acceptance. Rorty – who is most inspired by Dewey, partly by James, and not at all by Peirce – takes Darwin as his starting point, and sees human thought not as corresponding to external reality but merely as tools. Rorty’s pragmatism is in part a radical interpretation of James’ definition of truth as usefulness. As part of this, Rorty, like Dewey, wants to do away with old ‘Platonic’ dualisms inherited from older philosophy such as appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, objective-subjective, and sensible-intellectual. Part of the point here is that these beliefs are no longer useful for present purposes. I like Rorty’s political stuff a lot, and I think his great strength was precisely that he really did abandon a search for first principles and instead focussed on the question of what works.

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