Pragmatism: Evolutionary Development & Principles

The term Pragmatism was introduced by Peirce in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878). His “Pragmatic Maxim” was intended to be a criterion of the meaning of experience according to which “the meaning of a theory is equivalent to the practical effects of adopting it” (Bunnin & Yu, 2009: 546). With this founding principle, Peirce introduced the objective of usefulness in helping to clearly understand concepts: knowledge is “the account of reality that works best for us” (Kaplan et al., 2011: 205), although Thayer’s analysis suggests such derived meanings must be situationally contextualized ((1968: 429) in Crotty, 1998: 73). Peirce considered knowledge to be an explanatory tool, different from facts, but also acknowledged its fallibility: “we do not acquire knowledge simply by observing, but by doing, and we rely on that knowledge only so long as it is useful in the sense that it adequately explains things for us. When … better explanations make it redundant, we replace it.” (Kaplan et al., 2011: 207). He also asserted that the purpose of scientific inquiry (i.e. the search for knowledge) is to alleviate doubt, replacing it with belief. But, to be accepted, the formation of belief must be derived as the convergence of opinions from a community of investigators (i.e. not, an individual) and involve three modes of inference (abduction, deduction, and induction) ((Peirce, 1988) in Baggini & Stangroom, 2004: 182).