Kind Of Pragmatism Research Articles

Shannon, Wiener, and the Alethic Value of Information

This paper uses historical and deconstructive methods to examine contrasting visions of information’s alethic value. It focusses specifically on the research and legacies of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, two founding fathers of information science. Shannon’s formulation of information as a statistical function of probability emphasizes a kind of pragmatism: information that can be broken into bits and transmitted through a system possesses alethic value. Wiener’s research and career set a contrasting example to that of Shannon in relation to a construction of truth. The alethic value of information in the Wienerian tradition is derived not only from its pragmatic transference within a system, but also from the way in which it interacts with other systems through feedback loops. The dichotomy set by Shannon and Wiener implicates broader questions surrounding conceptualizations of truth in LIS research today.

On the Incompatibility of Pragmatist Philosophy and Scientistic Philosophy

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism.

Moral philosophy as an object of Hegel’s debate with Kant in The Phenomenology of Spirit

The history of Hegel’s critical controversy with Kant’s moral philosophy starts with the Frankfurt period of his work, when Hegel first opposed what he believed to be Kant’s absolutisation of the concept of duty and his neglect of the social content of morality. Although Hegel more than once addressed Kant’s moral philosophy, it is only in “Phenomenology of Spirit” that he formulated a more systemic and radical criticism. The basis of his critical argumentation is an attempt to reveal the main contradiction in Kant’s ethics by showing that the fulfilment of unconditional moral requirements leads to the complete elimination of morality itself. By uncovering the internal contradictions in Kant’s unconditional duty, Hegel demonstrates a certain kind of pragmatism in the interpretation of moral duty and offers instead a religious faith in the transcendental power of “communal” consciousness, which will become a principle that supposedly removes all contradictions of a moral worldview. These debates between the two most prominent classics of German idealism on the issue of whether moral demands are universal in nature or are always socially determined, has not lost its significance even today. This is because they present two substantially different ethical doctrines: one affirms the idea of the autonomy of moral consciousness and its formal unconditional character, while the other assumes that a certain moral duty can be legitimate only under specific socio-historical conditions.

Kraepelin's psychiatry in the pragmatic age.

The movement of a pendulum is often used as a metaphor to represent the history of twentieth century American psychiatry. On this view, American psychiatry evolved by swinging back and forth between two schools of thought in constant competition: somatic accounts of mental illness and psychodynamic ones. I argue that this narrative partly misrepresents the actual development of American psychiatry. I suggest that there were some important exchanges of ideas and practices in the transition from German biological approaches to American psychodynamic approaches. In particular, two kinds of pragmatism played an important role in this transition: Kraepelin's methodological pragmatism, and pragmatic values present in the American psychiatric context, due in part to the influence of William James. From a historical standpoint, I suggest that the metaphor of the pendulum doesn't capture the full complexities of this shift in psychiatry at the turn of the century; from a philosophical standpoint, my discussion brings to light two strands of pragmatism salient to scientific psychiatry.

Mishlei/Proverbs

A fresh look at the book of Proverbs (Mishlei) questions its criticism as misogynistic, and explores scholarly evidence of women’s varied functions in biblical society, including teaching and transmitting wisdom, particularly of the pragmatic kind lauded in Proverbs. The structure of the book is examined, noting how the introductory section (chapters 1–9), with its praise of Lady Wisdom, mirrors the concluding section (chapters 30–31), which features a wise queen’s counsel to her son and the eshet chayil, or ‘woman of worth’. An examination of references to fathers and mothers, and to both male and female figures of wisdom and folly, suggests that many of the proverbs of the main, earliest section (chapters 10–29) may be examples of women’s wisdom. Finally, the image of weaving – a central feature of women’s wisdom in the ancient Near East – is used to suggest a new understanding of this intricate and elaborate book.

The concept of warranted assertibility in Dewey as the heart of his instrumental pragmatism

Pragmatism started in the second half of the 19th century in North America and, in many respects, is still with us today. This school of thought has been hugely influential in many areas such as in the philosophy of language, science, logic and metaphysics; in the philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics and in the philosophy of religion. This article introduces Dewey’s specific kind of pragmatism in the context of classical American Pragmatism, represented by Peirce and James. We then examine the formation of the core of Dewey’s instrumental pragmatism - his concept of warranted assertibility. The analysis is based on five pragmatic themes - pluralism, anti-foundationalism, fallibilism, the agents of perspective and the communities of inquirers -; one scientific paradigm - Darwinian evolutionism - and one philosophical - Kantian German Idealism. We propose the importance of Dewey’s enduring legacy lies in the fact that his concept of warranted assertibility­ involves discussions of the relations between philosophy of language and philosophy of conduct, between rationality, discursive intentionality, responsibility and ethics.

Ontological Investigations of a Pragmatic Kind? A Reply to Lauer

This article is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

Testing pragmatic genealogy in political theory: The curious case of John Rawls

Starting from the ‘Dewey Lectures’, Rawls presents his conception of justice within a contextualist framework, as an elaboration of the basic ideas embedded in the political culture of liberal-democratic societies. But how are these basic ideas to be justified? In this article, I reconstruct and criticize Rawls’s strategy to answer this question. I explore an alternative strategy, consisting of a genealogical argument of a pragmatic kind – the kind of argument provided by authors like Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker. I outline this genealogical argument drawing on Rawls’s reconstruction of the origins of liberalism. Then, I clarify the conditions under which this kind of argument maintains vindicatory power. I claim that the argument satisfies these conditions and that pragmatic genealogy can thus partially vindicate the basic ideas of liberal-democratic societies.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Vailati, Papini, and the Synthetic Drive of Italian Pragmatism

According to the standard interpretation, Italian pragmatism is split into two groups. On the one hand is the mathematician Giovanni Vailati, Peano’s former collaborator, and his disciple, the economist Mario Calderoni. On the other hand, there are the two “brats,” Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, naïve philosophers with eccentric ideas. While Vailati and Calderoni followed Peirce’s mathematical and logical pragmatism, the other two articulated a “magical” pragmatism, a kind of relativist, post-modern version of the original American movement. The paper shows that this narrative is incomplete. During the years 1905-6, while Vailati was living in Florence, Italian pragmatists listed three kinds of pragmatism among themselves. Relying on the third stripe, attributed to Vailati, they found a more Unitarian, theoretical project that united the will to belief and the precision of reasoning. The unity did not last very long because Vailati moved from Florence in 1906. However, the common project from 1905-6 remains the highest peak of their awareness of pragmatism and, possibly, an original way to interpret it.

Reflections on My Lifetime Teacher: Dr. Willem J. Kolff.

Reflections on My Lifetime Teacher: Dr. Willem J. Kolff.

Knowledge as Potential for Action

Can we conceive cogently of all knowledge – in particular, all knowledge of truths – as being knowledge-how? This paper provides reasons for thinking not only that is this possible, but that it is conceptually advantageous and suggestive. Those reasons include adaptations of, and responses to, some classic philosophical arguments and ideas, from Descartes, Hume, Peirce, Mill, and Ryle. The paper’s position is thus a practicalism – a kind of pragmatism – about the nature of knowledge, arguing that all knowledge is knowledge-how to act – to do this, to do that. Such a conception can include, too, a distinctive view of the metaphysical relation between knowledge and belief. We see that, contrary to what most contemporary epistemologists say, knowledge need not be a form of belief. Instead, a belief that p can be a way simply of enriching or strengthening knowledge that p. It can do this in a paracticalist way, by allowing one to do more with the knowledge.

Il pragmatismo di Nietzsche. Saggi sul pensiero prospettivistico

Il pragmatismo di Nietzsche. Saggi sul pensiero prospettivistico

The Kindness of Psychopaths

ABSTRACTPsychopathy attracts considerable interdisciplinary interest. The idea of a group of people with abnormal morality and interpersonal relations raises important philosophical, legal and clinical issues. However, before engaging these issues, we ought to examine whether this category is scientifically grounded. We frame the issue in terms of the question whether ‘psychopathy’ designates a natural kind according to the cluster approaches. We argue that currently there is no sufficient evidence for an affirmative answer to this question. Furthermore, we examine three ways of dealing with the category of psychopathy. We could eliminate the category, revise it, or subscribe to a more encompassing account of kinds, which could capture psychopathy as it is currently conceptualised. We argue that while a revision of the category of psychopathy is to be expected with empirical and theoretical advancements, we also emphasise its role in clinical and forensic research, which makes it an important pragmatic kind.

Ethical Assumptions: A Criticism against Modern Pragmatism

The advent of neoliberalism in the early 1970s marked a new age for ethical practices. Although pragmatism as an approach to ethics pre-dated neoliberalism, the neoliberal approach to political economy ushered in a new kind of pragmatism, owing little to Jeremy Bentham, even less to the American philosophical pragmatists Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Today’s pragmatism has permeated the penal systems of the central countries of the world capitalist system. A new ethics emerged, a neopragmatism. Acts came to be judged by their effects and not by the motives that led to the actions. This altered the doctrine of Abrahamic religions, and led to the disappearance of forgiveness as a moral good.

A ‘Sound Grammar’ for the City: The spatial and temporal dimension of Barber’s concerts

This article focuses on one of the most suggestive proposals within the sound domain of the twentieth century: the concerts for bells and bell towers devised by the Spanish musician Llorenç Barber. His original idea of transforming the city into a monumental instrument provides the starting point for the analysis. In order to access the competing claims of sound art versus music, the text approaches Barber’s creative thinking as if it were a sound grammar devised specifically for the city: materials and performance techniques become a ‘phonetics’, structural elements as a ‘morphology’, the ‘syntax’ of sound-handling strategies, and the formal structure of the score as a ‘narrative’ of the concert. Within each dimension, the text shows how the ‘city instrument’ has extended Barber’s creative horizon by transforming musical problems into unclassifiable strategies of dealing with sound, which are capable of producing a sonic experience deeply rooted in the historical and cultural development of the city. Finally, this research shows how uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity, accident or change (unacceptable concepts for the traditional musical domain) become an essential part of these works. Inevitably, such aspects require from the ‘composer’ a kind of pragmatism that seems to be inherent in the outdoor sound design.

An Exemplification of American Pragmatism in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is the most accomplished American of his age and renowned as “The First American”. He has made great contributions in the fields of American education, science, diplomacy and economy. In his Autobiography, it portrays a story of a man from rags to riches, which reveals the pragmatic spirit. The pragmatism spirit in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography deeply relates to his life experience and social macro environment in the 18th American context. Franklin’s pragmatism embodies in the evaluation criteria of practical benefits, experimental approach and prevalent orientation for human progress. This kind of pragmatism has been deeply related to his life experience but also rooted in profound historical and cultural background, which exerts a far-reaching influence on the American pragmatism and formation of American national character.

Radical Pragmatism: An Operator’s Guide

Huw Price has recently argued that representationalism – the notion that the primary function of statements is to represent the world – is an utter failure. In its place he proposes a “global expressivism” that instead links the meaning of statements to how they are used. This makes his global expressivism a kind of pragmatism: a linguistic pragmatism because it focuses on linguistic meaning; a radical pragmatism because it rejects representationalism across the board. Price also introduces a distinction between two types of representation: external representation, which he mostly rejects, and internal representation, which he champions. In this article I weigh the strengths of Price’s radical pragmatism. I conclude that radical pragmatism has significant benefits, especially if we supplement external and internal representation with a third variety that I call operational representation.

At Home in the World? Re-Framing Zambia's Literature in English

This article seeks to problematise and question the conventional critical stance on Zambia's writing in English (which casts it as aesthetically sub-standard and ‘underdeveloped’), by recasting it as the embodiment of a local literariness of crisis. For much of its history, written literary texts from Zambia have been produced by a tiny cultural elite, which was prevented (by economic and political circumstances) from specialising in, or professionalising, the practice of producing English-language literature. Furthermore, the economic, political and cultural determinants of Zambia's decolonisation and its postcolonial history have given rise to a body of work in which the aesthetic functioning of texts is often integrated with pronounced non-aesthetic functionality. This is to say that, in this part of south-eastern Africa, the presence of nationalist pedagogy in literary works produced immediately after independence (which will surprise no one) frequently shades into other kinds of pragmatism, which may entail religious and spiritual moralism – and that this kind of literariness continues today, when Pentecostal Christianity exerts a strong influence on all kinds of local texts and meanings. Relying in part on terminologies related to world literature and new cosmopolitanisms, I argue that such texts should, nevertheless, be regarded as participating in a specifically shaped system of literariness and literary value, and illustrate my argument with readings of strategically selected moments in the history of Zambian fiction in English: the path-breaking work of Lusaka's New Writers' Group and novels by Dominic Mulaisho and Grieve Sibale.

William James on Religious Saints and Verifying the God Hypothesis

William James proposed a Science of Religions in his Varieties of Religious Experience in order to fulfill his promise that pragmatic empiricism could illuminate the meaning and truth conditions of religious ideas. Most commentators have focused either on his “will to believe” defense of faith, or on his analysis of the power of mystical inspiration. A unifying interpretation is assembled, synthesizing his kind of pragmatism, his fascination with mysticism, and his application of Science of Religions to religious saints. Religious saints generate live hypotheses about society moving towards the ideal moral order. People can participate in that momentous opportunity for progress with their own moral lives. Although James’s Science of Religions permits interdisciplinary inquiry into religious experience, and especially the moral energy of inspired saints, his hopes for verifying hypotheses about God cannot be fulfilled.