Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality.
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Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s.
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Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known.
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Pragmatism argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages.
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Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true.
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Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values.
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Pragmatism held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved.
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Pragmatism stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself.
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Pragmatism emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient.
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Pragmatism defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general.
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Pragmatism emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given.
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Pragmatism suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness: things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements.
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Pragmatism identified 13 different philosophical positions that were each labeled pragmatism.
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Pragmatism argued that, in William James's pragmatism, truth is entirely subjective and is not the widely accepted definition of truth, which is correspondence to reality.
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