Pragmatism, a Match and a Lot of Fuel.
What does it mean to be pragmatic in philosophy?
Pragmatism, a match and a lot of fuel
To practice philosophy for me is like wandering in a Cartesian realm. It’s like walking in a kingdom of abstractions, plastic ideas, and strange formulations. However, since we are biological machines, made to reproduce, compete, and evacuate our biological wastes, then, one may consider philosophy as something ephemeral. But is it?
To a very pragmatic philosopher (like Hillary Putnam), philosophy is a technology. It is something that improves our abilities. “Decision-making”, for example, can be helped by logic, politics, discussions about what freedom is and other intellectual issues.
In that sense, philosophy can improve almost everyone’s language, or thinking abilities. And by “everyone” I mean “people carrying all sorts of interests and objectives”.
It’s true, on the other hand, “almost everyone” is not “everyone”. So, who exactly needs it? Who needs philosophy? It’s an ethical question. It depends on your objective. If you want to burn all thoughts there ever was in history you won’t need philosophy, only a match and a lot of fuel.
Being pragmatic in philosophy
What does it mean to be pragmatic? This is an important question for philosophers like Hillary Putnam. He considered the most recent implications of this question in his book Pragmatism and Realism, and to help you navigate through them, I also suggest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry for pragmatism.
But outside the academic realm there is also a clear, direct use of the sense of what is a pragmatic person. For a layman, a pragmatist is just a hasty thinker. That is, it is either someone philosophically short-sighted or someone who really knows a shortcut. However, that’s not enough. We must do a little more thinking here because being hasty is not exactly the same as being pragmatic. Even though, sometimes, one thing may have something to do with the other. Additionally, I wouldn’t write a text about “the importance of being pragmatic” to praise shortsighted philosophers, or useless hasty philosophers. Shortsighted philosophers shouldn’t even be called pragmatic. Only “dumb” would suffice.
Defining pragmatism
According to Putnam’s book Pragmatism and Realism, and to Stanford Encyclopedia, these would be good definitions of pragmatism:
1) They believe “that a claim is true if and only if it is useful”. (Legg, C. and Hookway, C. in Stanford Enciclopedia of Philosophy).
But useful to whom?
2) They “try to philosophize in ways that are relevant to the real problems of real human beings”. (Putnam, R. A. in Pragmatism and Realism).
But do “unreal human beings” exist?
3) For them “all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation” (Legg, C. and Hookway, C. in Stanford Enciclopedia of Philosophy).
I agree, and I admire pragmatism, but, as Putnam and Kuhn states, scientific experimentation should not be mistaken as sheer obedience to a static scientific disciplinary matrix (see Kuhn’s concepts of “disciplinary matrix” and “paradigm”, and Putnam’s chapter: Pragmatism and Nonscientific Knowledge, in his book Pragmatism and Realism).
A better definition
As I pointed out, the first two definitions are weak, while the third one is short-sighted. Thus, so far, or either pragmatism is flawed, or it needs more elaborations. Since I don’t think flawed is the case here, let’s try to define it in a better way.
In order to define pragmatism, it’s important to consider that it can be relevant in (1) epistemology, i.e., just like Wittgenstein philosophy can be labeled as (when he argues in favor that some paradoxes are “unsolvable”, and, therefore, should be considered as natural descriptions in the language game); and pragmatism can also be a relevant way of thinking in (2) ethics.
Pragmatism as an ethical philosophy, I think, is not so strong (it’s shallow), because there isn’t, necessarily, absolute truths in ethics. For example, if it’s the desire of a group of people to value “fun” instead of “justice”, resulting in criminals and even innocent people, being thrown out of a city by big catapults, still, we couldn’t say these people are ethically wrong, since it was their desire to just have fun and not justice (in any sense).
In epistemology, on the other hand, I think pragmatism is stronger. A pragmatic epistemology is kind of a philosophy of “shortcuts”, of words of clarity, and of the will to test ideas in reality. In that sense, there is nothing absolutely wrong with pragmatism. Quite the contrary. Epistemic pragmatism is keen, fond of brief but powerful ideas, and of problem-solving (unlike many present day philosophers).
In fact, if saving time is one of pragmatism’s main characteristics, then Occam was possibly the first pragmatist in history. He was the priest philosopher to whom we attribute the principle of parsimony or “the Occam’s Razor”: “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. But, of course, the ephemeral also has its place in everyone’s life, or in almost everyone’s.
