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Is pragmatism the optimistic expression of the industrial era, deemed to be vanishing in the postindustrial society, or is it a serious philosophical alternative to traditional rationalism and empiricism, idealism and realism? What is labeled pragmatism ranges from the philosophy of nineteenth-century American scholar Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who claimed inquiry for truth's sake, to Richard Rorty's (b. 1931) twentieth-century neo-pragmatism, which claims, in an antirealist spirit, that criteria of evidence are not objective but only conversational constraints. Most pragmatists, however, try to find a middle way between metaphysical realism and relativism, between dogmatism and skepticism, by using the pragmatic maxim. This maxim holds that in order to ascertain the meaning of an idea one should consider the practical consequences that might conceivably result from it.

Belief is considered to be guiding people's actions in that it is a habit, a disposition to behave. Its opposite is doubt, which, unlike René Descartes's methodological doubt, is involuntary and unpleasant, usually caused by some surprising phenomenon that is inconsistent with one's previously accepted beliefs. Inquiry starts when humans, like other organisms, strive to obtain an equilibrium with their environment, the inquiry manifesting itself in new habits and revised beliefs. Successful inquiry results in a stable viewpoint, but only temporarily stable, seen in the long run. Sophisticated inquirers will therefore always be motivated to further inquiry, transforming the primitive homeostatic process into scientific inquiry.

Universalizing pragmatism: John Dewey

American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) was deeply influenced by Peirce's idea of scientific method and inquiry, but Dewey broadens it to take on universal scope. He conceives of the scientific method simply as the way people actually think, or ought to think. Unlike Peirce, Dewey also emphasizes the immediacy of experience, generally characterized in terms of its aesthetic quality, as felt immediacy and, as such, basic and irreducible. Cognitive experience is the result of inquiry. The process starts when a person encounters some difficulty, proceeds through the stage of conceptual elaboration of possible resolutions, and results in a final reconstruction of the experience into a new unified whole. With this idea, Dewey and other pragmatists question what are labeled "spectator theories of knowledge," according to which knowledge is a kind of passive recording of antecedent facts. Instead, knowing is seen as a constructive conceptual activity, anticipating and guiding our adjustment to future experiential interactions with our environment. The classical ontological distinctions in philosophy between mind and body, between means and end, and especially between fact and value, therefore cannot be ascribed an absolute status but should rather be functionally and contextually understood. Consequently, Dewey rejects the idea of truth as correspondence of thought to unknowable thingsin-themselves. Instead, it is a matter of successful adjustment of ideas to problematic situations. For that reason, Dewey prefers to talk about warranted assertability.

Pragmatism in science: W. V. O. Quine

Like all pragmatists, the neo-pragmatist W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century, also rejects the idea of reaching the balance between language, truth, and reality once and for all as an unusable fiction. He develops the idea of the interactivity between conceptual invention and discovery of content in the sense that the conceptual system as a whole has to pass the test against experience. There is no guarantee that any kind of truth could be excepted from a future process of revision. Since there is no unique method of finding truth, nor any universal language for finding the final conceptualization of the world, there is no way of talking about reality as such. Nevertheless, for Quine, the danger of relativism is illusionary. What has been obtained in scientific research through epistemological and ontological decisions is absolutely binding, although in the future it will probably have to be modified or even given up. In what way there will be a change, however, lies beyond present cognitive abilities.

Pragmatism in religion: William James

The objection of subjectivism and relativism is also directed against nineteenth-century American philosopher William James's (1842–1910) conception of truth. Unlike Peirce (and to some extent Dewey), James does not focus only on the empirically testable consequences of a belief. He rather shifts the emphasis to what the consequences of a person having a belief are. True beliefs work. Not surprisingly, this conception of truth has been taken as a straight identification of truth with utility. James, however, distinguishes between the different ways that different beliefs work. Concerning empirical judgments, "true" means "verified through observation and experiment." Thus, the accusation of identifying truth with utility cannot be applied to empirical judgments. Neither does it affect a priori truths since they are truths that one is prepared to accept in the sense of conceptual presuppositions by means of which one talks about reality. Only concerning a third kind of truths—moral, aesthetic, and religious ones—is the pragmatic identification of truth and usefulness valid. The kind of judgment involved here cannot be empirically verified. The truth-value of such judgments is given by their practical working in life. If religions shall be more than idle talk, they have to have practical consequences for the people who choose them; they have to work psychologically satisfactorily in their lives. James defends people's right to have religious beliefs if the choice between believing them and disbelieving them is unavoidable, and if they offer a real option, even though religious beliefs cannot be decided on the basis of empirical evidence.

Pragmatism in science and religion

In one specific sense there is, according to pragmatism, no difference between science and religion. Both activities have to be understood in relation to the kind of beings human are. Neither science nor religion can address reality as independent of human experience. However, whereas science deals with experimental, observational experience, religion concerns existential experience. A theory is empirically adequate if it enables people to generate testable hypotheses and thereby maintain what is true in the observable world. Religions and their secular counterparts are existentially adequate if they provide people with conceptions of life at its best so that, in the tension between how life is and how it could be, they can attain a feeling for good and evil, right and wrong, and thus generate values and meaning, and express what is true in their lives.

See also CONSTRUCTIVISM; CONTEXTUALISM; IDEALISM; REALISM

EBERHARD HERRMANN