Pragmatism says an idea means nothing more than what it does
America's homegrown philosophy started in a Cambridge discussion group in the 1870s with a bold test: to understand any concept, list the practical effects it would have, and that list is the whole of its meaning. Words and theories, on this view, are tools for acting in the world rather than mirrors held up to it.
The founders were Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, with Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead also shaping the discussions of their Metaphysical Club. Peirce set out the core idea, later called the pragmatic maxim, in his 1878 essay How to Make Our Ideas Clear. James first printed the name pragmatism in 1898, crediting Peirce with coining it two decades earlier. The word comes from the Greek pragma, a deed or act. Peirce himself traced the insight to Alexander Bain's definition of belief as what a person is ready to act on, and called Nicholas St. John Green, who promoted it, the grandfather of the movement.
Unity did not last. Unhappy with how James, F. C. S. Schiller and literary writers were using the label, Peirce in 1905 renamed his own version pragmaticism, and he later admitted real disagreements with James. He also insisted that inquiry starts from genuine doubt, not the theatrical doubt of philosophers, and argued as early as 1868 that we have no direct intuition of our own minds; the self is inferred from dealings with the outside world, which undercut a tool philosophers had leaned on since Descartes.
Pragmatists typically hold a cluster of positions. Scientific theories should be judged by how well they explain and predict rather than whether they copy reality. There is more than one sound way to carve up the world. Truth, in the pragmatic version, is what proves useful to believe. Dewey warned against what he called the philosophical fallacy: treating categories like mental and physical, invented to solve particular problems, as if they were fixed features of the universe.
The tradition revived in the 1960s when W. V. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a reworked pragmatism against logical positivism. Richard Rorty then led a neopragmatist wave, alongside Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Pragmatists still split over relativism: Joseph Margolis embraces it, while Putnam and Susan Haack consider it a serious mistake.
Source: Pragmatism
