Definitions
- Unilateralism (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition): A tendency of nations to conduct their foreign affairs individualistically, characterized by minimal consultation and involvement with other nations, even their allies.
- Unilateralism (WordNet 2.0, Princeton University): the doctrine that nations should conduct their foreign affairs individualistically without the advice or involvement of other nations
- Pragmatism (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition):
- Philosophy. A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.
- A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.
- Pragmatism (The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary): A way of approaching situations or solving problems that emphasizes practical applications and consequences.
- Pragmatism (WordNet 2.0, Princeton University):
- (philosophy) the doctrine that practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge and meaning and value.
- 2: the attribute of accepting the facts of life and favoring practicality and literal truth [syn: realism].
- Peace (American Hertiage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition):
- The absence of war or other hostilities.
- An agreement or a treaty to end hostilities.
- Public security and order.
- Free from strife.
- Peace (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law):
- a state of tranquillity or quiet
- a state of security or order within a community provided for by law or custom <keeping the peace>
- freedom from civil disturbance
EvidenceNewsweek | January 16, 2006
“Heart of a Nation.” Kevin Peraino, Dan Ephron, and Jeffrey Batholet. Pg.28-36
“Lining Up at the Starting Gate.” Pg.34-35
“The Things That Have Not Changed.” Fareed Zakaria. Pg. 37
“I’m Not Afraid.” Lally Weymouth. Pg. 38-39
Time | January 16, 2006
“Troubled Soil.” Johanna McGeary (with Jamil Hamad, Aaron J. Klein, Eric Silver, and Elaine Shannon). Pg. 50-55
“The Lonely Warrior.” Lisa Beyer (with Aaron J. Klein and Douglas Waller). Pg. The Gazette | January 25, 2006
“Olmert: West Bank not worth trouble.” Knight Ridder Newspapers.
“Palestinians smash border wall in protest.” The Washington Post.
“Under Sharon’s leadership, Israel chose a ‘third way’.” Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist. Washington Post.
The Economist | January 7, 2006
“After Sharon.”
“What comes next?”
Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced , lived
September 10,
1839 –
April 19,
1914) was an
American logician,
philosopher,
scientist, and
mathematician.
He is considered to be the founder of
pragmatism and the father of modern
semiotics. In recent decades, his thought has enjoyed renewed appreciation. At present, he is widely regarded as an innovator in many fields, especially the methodology of
research and the
philosophy of science.
Peirce's philosophy Founder of
pragmatism (according to
William James), and unlike some later pragmatists such as
James and
John Dewey, Peirce conceived of pragmatism primarily as a method for the clarification of
ideas, which involved applying the methods of
science to
philosophical issues. Pragmatism has been regarded as a distinctively American philosophy.
William James (
January 11,
1842,
New York -
August 26,
1910, Chocorua,
New Hampshire). William James was born in New York, son of
Henry James, Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric
Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have, since the 1930s, made it a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
EpistemologyJames defined
truth as that which works in the way of belief. "True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse" but "all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere," he wrote.
Pragmatism as a view of the meaning of truth is considered obsolete in contemporary philosophy, because the predominant trend of thinking in the years since James' death (1910) has been toward non-epistemic definitions of truth, i.e. definitions that don't make truth dependent upon the warrant of a belief. A contemporary philosopher or logician will often be found explaining that the statement "the book is on the table" is true if and only if the book is on the table.
In
What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "truth is
one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.
Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."
Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement, and that we should not regard it as such; however, James does phrase it as the "central point" of the pragmatist doctrine of truth.
Pragmatism is a
philosophy that insists on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of meaning and truth.
Pragmatism objects to the view that human concepts and intellect represent reality, and therefore stands in opposition to both
formalist and
rationalist schools of
philosophy. Thus, in contrast to
positivism and apriorism, pragmatism holds that it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire significance, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it
becomes true. Pragmatism does not hold, however, that just anything that is useful or practical should be regarded as true, or anything that helps us to survive merely in the short-term; pragmatists argue that what should be taken as true is that which most contributes to the most human good over the longest course. In practice, this means that for pragmatists, theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices--i.e., that one should be able to make predictions and test them--and that ultimately the needs of humankind should guide the path of human inquiry.
Pragmatism originated in the
United States in the late
1800s.
Like any philosophical movement, the nature and content of pragmatism is a subject of considerable debate, whether it is one of exegesis (determining what the original pragmatists thought it was) or subtantive philosophical theory (what is the most defensible theory that satisfies certain goals). The term pragmatism was first used by
William James, who attributed the doctrine to
Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce later went on to disavow the term in favour of
pragmaticism, in order to distinguish his views from those of James and the other major pragmatist thinker,
John Dewey. Peirce and James were colleagues at Harvard in the 1870s, and were members of the same 'metaphysical club' or philosophical discussion group (for an excellent account of which, see the
Pulitzer Prize-winning book by
Louis Menand). Dewey was educated in Vermont but is most commonly associated with the
University of Chicago, though he also taught at Michigan and Columbia, and briefly at the
University of Minnesota.
What is common to all three thinkers' philosophy - and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as
Oliver Wendell Holmes - is a broad emphasis on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical in inquiry in general (particularly philosophical inquiry). One famous aspect of this view is Peirce's insistence that contrary to
Descartes' famous and influential method in the
Meditations on First Philosophy,
doubt cannot be feigned or created for the purpose of conducting philosophical inquiry. Doubt, like
belief, requires justification, that is, it arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of
fact (from what Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific
proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about that proposition.
Hilary Putnam (a contemporary or 'neo' pragmatist) has characterised pragmatism in terms of these and other themes: (1) the primacy of practice, (2) the collapse of any broad-ranging fact/value dichotomy, (3) antiscepticism (or the view that sceptical doubt, like any doubt, requires justification in order to be genuine) and (4) fallibilism: there is never an absolute or
metaphysical guarantee that a given belief is true and will never, therefore, be revised. Indeed Putnam goes on to suggest that the reconciliation of (3) and (4) is the central claim of American pragmatism.
Perhaps the most notorious pragmatist view - its theory of
truth - appears frequently in James' work, but occupies a much smaller portion of the work of Peirce and Dewey. This theory is often caricatured in contemporary literature as the view that 'truth is what works', or that any idea that has practical utility is true. In reality the theory is a great deal more subtle, and bears a striking resemblance to better-respected contemporary views, particularly
Crispin Wright's 'superassertibility' (see his book 'Truth & Objectivity').
HistoryA useful general account of pragmatism's origins during the late
19th and early
20th centuries is
Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. According to Menand, pragmatism took form largely in response to the work of
Charles Darwin (
evolution, ongoing process, and a non-epistemological view of history),
statistics (the recognition of the role of randomness in the unfolding of events, and of the presence of regularity within randomness), American
democracy (values of pluralism and consensus applied to knowledge as well as politics), and in particular the
American Civil War (a rejection of the sort of absolutizing or dualizing claims [i.e., to Truth] that provide the philosophical underpinnings of war).
Some scholars have noted a similarity between pragmatism and some elements in Buddhist philosophical thought,
see Buddhism. William James himself noticed the similarity, writing in
The Varieties of Religious Experience that "I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction ... but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of
Karma, I agree in principle with that."
James defined
truth as that which works in the way of belief. "True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse" but "all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere," he wrote.
Pragmatism as a view of the meaning of truth is considered obsolete by many in contemporary philosophy, because the predominant trend of thinking in the years since James' death (1910) has been toward non-epistemic definitions of truth, i.e. definitions that don't make truth dependent upon the warrant of a belief. A contemporary philosopher or logician will often be found explaining that the statement "the book is on the table" is true if and only if the book is on the table.
In
What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "truth is
one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.
Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."
Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement, and that we should not regard it as such. James seems to say incompatible things about truth. In addition to truth being what is good in the way of belief, he also says truth is correspondence with reality, or 'the facts'. But this may be interpreted as viewing the
property of truth as correspondence with reality while maintaining that the
concept of truth is whatever is good in the way of belief. True to pragmatist spirit, he never purported to be providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for truth.
Cash ValueFrom William James's
Pragmatism 1981;
ISBN 0915145057; from the Introduction by Bruce Kuklick p.xiv.
James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if in the long run it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "Cash Value" was, what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satifactorily in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as
biological fitness. If what was true was what worked, then scientific investigate religion's claim to truth in the same manner. The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked. James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying—they enabled us to lead fuller, richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives. Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence, just as scientific beliefs were.
