Pragmatism - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

This encyclopedia article consists of approximately 10 pages of information about Pragmatism.

Pragmatism - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

This encyclopedia article consists of approximately 10 pages of information about Pragmatism.
This section contains 2,687 words
(approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Pragmatism Encyclopedia Article

"Pragmatic" seems to have been used for the first time in the modern Western philosophical tradition by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); for him, there was some connection with ethics, but little with science or technology in the modern sense. In the early twentieth century, pragmatics turns up as a third subdivision of a formal semantics triad (see Morris 1938), but it has only a remote connection to science by way of mathematics, and none to ethics or technology.

In most introductory accounts, "pragmatism" as a term for a philosophical approach is usually taken to be synonymous with a "pragmatic theory of truth." We can be sure about something if it has practical or real-world consequences. Enemies of philosophical pragmatism even caricature this as meaning that the test of the truth of a statement—even about ethics—is whether or not it works. Such characterizations are unfair to the nuanced thought of...

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This section contains 2,687 words
(approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Pragmatism Encyclopedia Article
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Pragmatism from Macmillan. Copyright © 2001-2006 by Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of the Gale Group. All rights reserved.