Pragmatism

Pragmatism began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce first defined and defended it, and his close friend William James developed and popularised it; both were keen observers of the scientific revolution around evolutionary theory. A second generation, led by John Dewey and Jane Addams, turned it towards politics, education and social improvement.

Its central idea, understood very broadly, is that knowing the world cannot be separated from acting in it. Pragmatists read that idea in strikingly different ways: that concepts should be tested by experiment, that a claim is true if it is useful, that experience is a transaction with nature rather than a picture of it. Since the 1970s the tradition has revived, notably in Richard Rorty’s “neopragmatism”, and it is now a third alternative to analytic and continental philosophy.