Sometimes we hear
about uniquely American ideas or versions of ideas, with terms like American exceptionalism,
rugged individualism, and even American anti-intellectualism. Another American
phenomenon that is derived from Eastern philosophies and contemplation is
American Transcendentalism, as interpreted from the works of Emerson, Thoreau,
and others. This is perhaps a uniquely American contemplative tradition that utilizes
Hindu philosophy and Buddhist contemplation, particularly the notion of “mindfulness”
and the techniques of Zen. The American version is, of course, often stripped
of religious connotations and set the stage for a more secular mindfulness
tradition that led to practical ideas like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based
stress reduction and forms of non-denominational contemplation. Perhaps the
best and most useful American philosophical idea, or rather method, is
pragmatism, as developed mainly by Charles Pierce and William James. The authors
of the 2012 book New World Mindfulness speak of a “perennial American
pragmatism” that imbues these contemplatives. William James was strongly
influenced by Emerson, who he knew in childhood as a friend of his
father, Henry James. James is known as the “father of psychology” and indeed
psychologists and psychoanalysts made up much of the students of Eastern
mysticism from the late nineteenth century onward. One might say that
pragmatism is a practical offshoot of utilitarianism as developed by Jermy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill. I wrote a little about pragmatism and utilitarianism in
my 2021 book Sensible Decarbonization. Below is an excerpt of part of that section.
Excerpt
{ One dictionary
definition of pragmatism is “an approach to {philosophy} that assesses the
truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their
practical application.” William James, one of the early developers of the idea,
wrote about the pragmatic method of
dealing with disputes by determining the practical consequences of each
position in the dispute. James noted that Charles Pierce, in an 1878 article
entitled How to Make Our Ideas Clear,
pointed out that “our beliefs are really
rules for action.” Pragmatism is a philosophical approach to problems and
disputes that emphasizes practicality. James stressed pragmatism as a method,
rather than a theory or ideology. He noted that it was in accord with
utilitarianism, “the doctrine that
actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.” Another
way James described the pragmatic method was: “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles,
“categories,” supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits,
consequences, facts.” One might see it as preferring practical method over
following principle.1
Pragmatism can be seen as closely
aligned to utilitarianism, a philosophical position that favors usefulness as
pragmatism favors practicality. Or one might say that pragmatism as a method
favors the philosophical position of utilitarianism. British philosophers
Jeremy Bentham and later John Stuart Mill developed the idea of utilitarianism.
One of its maxims is “The
greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.” Mill
defined it as a “creed,” but one might better see it as a
philosophical position. Mill wrote: “The
creed which accepts as the foundation of morals utility, or the greatest
happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to
promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
For all practical purposes, the utilitarian ideal is a good rule of
thumb. Its only failing perhaps is Mill’s nod to moral idealism, that there
is always an absolute right and wrong. Many issues are nuanced and have details
where benefits and detriments must be weighed to arrive at a definite
conclusion as to whether there is net happiness or unhappiness. However, moral
idealism is actually more prominent among non-utilitarians, often including
those who base morality strictly on religion and among those ideological
activists who see certain technologies as morally reprehensible.2 3
Philosopher Richard Rorty noted that moral relativism, the idea that morality
is based on impacts and consequences relative to other alternative impacts and
consequences, has long been getting a bad rap. Moral relativism can be seen in
the idea of the necessity of trade-offs, which is simply another way to say we
should base risk decisions on an analysis of costs vs. benefits, often relative
costs vs. relative benefits. I think some form of impact relativism is needed
in environmental debates. We also need to value our best way of knowing things –
science. Rorty was influenced by postmodernists and though he promoted
pragmatism he also saw science as more of a “social construction”
than it really is – an incorrect assumption, I think. As Thomas Kuhn noted,
science is based partly on consensus and peer review which are influenced by
prevailing attitudes and paradigms, but it is by and far based on direct
observation and repeatable experimental results. The methods of science are
sound, but the prevailing paradigms can sometimes be less flexible than they
should be.4 5
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein notes that arguments about public policy are often expressive, and that people tend to favor approaches that allow them to express their values. People’s values are often entwined with their political identities. He argues against this expressivism, noting that much of the time it only appears that differences in values divide us, but rather that it is disagreements about facts. We make judgments to discern what the facts are when the facts are not clear.6 Activists of most sorts are motivated by expressing their beliefs and values, standing symbolically for something or with someone. Pragmatists are more concerned with getting the facts correct. It is important to get facts correct but we often disagree about facts. The climate change debate has enough uncertainty and vagueness that disagreements about facts are quite common. The same facts, interpreted in different ways, are often used as support for differing positions in climate debates and many other environmental, social, and political debates. Conclusions not supported by the facts often find their way into headlines, book titles, and journal article titles. Facts can be manipulated through rhetoric and cognitive tricks. Fact-checking is generally useful but it also can be biased and veer into censorship. Ideally, it’s a process of refinement but as long as there are uncertainties, those uncertainties will be exploited. } end of excerpt
Oxford philosophy
professor Jonny Thomson wrote an article in 2021 for Big Think about pragmatism
as how Americans define truth, pointing out that the origin of the idea was
meant to counter abstract European philosophy, particularly that of Kant and
Hegel.
“Pragmatism is an American philosophical movement that
originated as a rebuke to abstract European philosophy. The pragmatic theory of
truth argues that truth and reality only can be understood in their relation to
how things work in the real world.”
Ancient Greek and
Roman philosophers were not just ponderers of the nature of reality but doers who
sought to live their philosophical ideas. Philosophy then was often considered
methodical, a way of approaching real-world situations. Pragmatism is a return
to that sort of approach. Thomson notes:
“…we measure things by how they work and what they do.
The same goes for truth.”
Thomson says that Pierce and James would disagree about outmoded ways of seeing things such as a Ptolemaic view of the planetary
motion or Aristotle’s version of gravity. James would say they were “true”
while Pierce would say they never were true. For Pierce, the current scientific
consensus defines truth as the most complete version of reality at which we can
arrive at current understanding. The difference is mainly semantic since
future ideas are not known by those of the past. According to Thomson:
“…Peirce’s Pragmatism speaks to two broader and much more
widely accepted epistemic virtues: an openness to accept error and the
willingness to correct it.”
Pierce’s pragmatism says the more informed we become the
closer we will get to the real truth and people of the future will likely be
closer than we are to that real truth due to the increase in information and scientifically
derived knowledge and our acceptance and correction of past errors. In that way,
one might say that truth “evolves.” Thomson concludes:
“Pragmatism has a certain intuitive appeal. Truth which
is abstracted from how things operate in the real world often makes very little
sense. The idea of a world “out there” beyond our minds — a world which is
unseen, unknown, and unimaginable — is also unintelligible (as Kant pointed
out) if it is not tied, in some way, both to how the world works and to what we
humans can interact with.”
“People like Peirce should be praised for a very American
Pragmatism that gave out an exasperated and down-to-earth plea for philosophy
to stop being quite so abstract.”
One of the main
precursors of pragmatism, utilitarianism, is considered to be a moral philosophy
that can be quite general and that generality reveals its limitations. The statement “What causes
the most happiness is what is good” is very general and may be limited in its
lack of nuance. It is perhaps a good rule of thumb, but it is lacking in detail.
It is not always easy to discern what causes or promotes the greatest degree of
happiness. Utilitarianism also does not consider motives. One might inadvertently
cause a great amount of happiness and yet have immoral motives, or one might cause
unhappiness with good and moral motives. My own view is that the creation of
happiness for the most people is primary and the motives are secondary, at
least for society, or some other subsection of it. Doing good with bad motives is
only bad for the one with bad motives. Causing harm with good motives presents
another problem that seems to occur frequently. Motives are very important for
an individual but results or effects are the real measure for society. One of
the main difficulties of applying utilitarianism is measuring the positive and
negative effects of an action. That is why many regulatory issues seek to
quantify benefits and costs, risks, or detriments. Cost-benefit analysis
pervades regulation for good reasons. We need to compare the benefits and harms
and typically we accept some harm for overall benefit. Accepting these
trade-offs takes the issues into pragmatic territory.
We sometimes hear about pragmatic politicians. In these cases, the so-called pragmatists are those in favor of getting things done and are more likely to be cooperative, collaborative, and bipartisan. It is perhaps a more general definition of pragmatism.
Carla Tardi in an
article about utilitarianism for Investopedia notes:
“Qualitative utilitarianism argues that mental pleasures
and pains are different in kind and superior in quality to purely physical
ones. Quantitative utilitarianism argues that mental pleasures and pains differ
from physical ones only in terms of quantity.”
In capitalism, we
have the profit motive, but we should also consider the utilitarian motive,
which is basically the effects on society. Perhaps pragmatism can be defined as
the method of determining the net utilitarian effects, which basically involves
some kind of cost-benefit analysis.
In discussing the
limitations of utilitarianism, Tardi notes that it is difficult to quantify
ideas like justice and individual rights. The needs of the many may outweigh
the needs of the few, but we typically don’t condone killing a person to save multiple
other people. She also notes that we often don’t know the net future effects of
our actions in terms of benefits and harms.
“Utilitarianism also cannot predict with certainty
whether the consequences of our actions will be good or bad—the results of our
actions happen in the future.”
In any case, as
James seems to suggest, pragmatism can be seen as the method or application of
utilitarianism to solve real-world problems. Pierce’s notion of pragmatism went
relatively unnoticed until James expounded on it 20 years later. James argued in
his essay “What Pragmatism Means” that philosophy that is not practical in real-world
terms is basically irrelevant. He wrote that the method of pragmatism:
“…appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for
more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing
realities may be ‘changed,’”
He also described pragmatism as having no doctrines or dogmas
and being by nature anti-intellectual, less concerned with rational
analysis in its focus on practicality. It is an attitude of orientation,
he noted. James realized that many of our scientific laws are really approximations,
and truth is merely an instrument that leads to practical success when applied.
New truths replace old truths as knowledge evolves. James says that pragmatism
is first a method and second a “genetic theory of what is meant by truth.”
He also saw pragmatism as in line with humanism. He saw rationalism as too abstract,
and pragmatism as only concerned with facts. I see pragmatism as in accord with
the Pyrrhonism of Pyrrho of Elis and his later Roman expounder Sextus
Empiricus. Their philosophy, also considered a method, in this case, a method to
avoid unnecessary anxiety, is also based on focusing only on facts, regarding
what is not readily evident as basically unnecessary. They also said that we
can only develop functional ideas based on facts, not on speculation. One difference between Pyrrhonism and
pragmatism is perhaps that the former considers metaphysical speculation to be
useless and a cause for unnecessary anxiety while the latter would also
consider the effects of such speculation or religious contemplation as a source
of human comfort, which gives it a practical value, or as he says it, pragmatism “will count mystical experiences if they
have practical consequences.”
We all have
beliefs and prejudices, and new information takes time to penetrate to dissolve
those old orientations. James notes in his essay “Pragmatism and Common Sense”
that:
“New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of
old truths combined and mutually modifying one another.”
He notes that common sense is akin to good judgment and is
often based on old knowledge discovered by others long ago and often passed on by
being built into the structure of language.
In another essay “Pragmatism
and Humanism” James notes that we are naturally humanistic:
“Human motives sharpen all our questions, human
satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist.”
He also notes that we can’t really separate our knowledge
and theories from humanistic considerations as they are built in. We are
naturally humanistic.
“Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms,
and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is
wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of
them.”
Pragmatism considers
the utilitarian effects of any hypothesis, as James notes in his essay “Pragmatism
and Religion.”
“On pragmatic principles we can not reject any hypothesis
if consequences useful to life flow from it.”
In other words, there is no meaning or reality without
usefulness. He seems to say there is no theoretical pragmatism, only applied pragmatism,
which reiterates that pragmatism is a method, rather than a school of thought.
References:
Sensible
Decarbonization: Regulation, Risk, and Relative Benefits in Different
Approaches to Energy Use, Climate Policy, and Environmental Impact. Kent C. Stewart.
Amazon Publishing. March 2021.
Pragmatism:
How Americans define truth. Jonny Thomson. Big Think. July 26, 2021. Pragmatism:
How Americans define truth - Big Think
Pragmatism
and Other Essays. William James. 1963 (originally early 1900s). Washington
Square Press.
Utilitarianism:
What It Is, Founders, and Main Principles. Carla Tardi. Investopedia. Updated
May 06, 2024. Utilitarianism:
What It Is, Founders, and Main Principles
New
World Mindfulness: From the Founding Fathers, Emerson, and Thoreau to Your
Personal Practice by Donald McCown and Marc S. Micozzi, M.D. Ph D. (Healing
Arts Press 2012)
Excerpt References:
1
James, William, 1963 (originally early
1900’s). Pragmatism and Other Essays. Washington Square Press.
2
Kenton, Will, March 13, 2018. Utilitarianism Defined. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utilitarianism
3
Mill, John Stewart, orig. 1863. Utilitarianism
4
Wikipedia entry. ‘Moral relativism.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
5
Rorty, Richard, Nov. 1999. Phony Science Wars.
The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/11/phony-sciencewars/377882/
6
Sunstein, Cass, August 28, 2018. The
Cost-Benefit Revolution. The MIT Press.
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