Pragmatic Ideas Research Articles

Projects-as-Practice

This article contributes a practice-based approach to project management by opening up to the messiness and unpredictabilities involved in actually doing project work. Drawing on the Pragmatist ideas of John Dewey, we theorize projects-as-practices (noun) and projects-as-practice (verb) as complementary concepts that are built respectively on ontologies of being and becoming. For the purposes of this article, we define the notion of project as an emergent social process of becoming, bounded in time and space, and generative of novel outcomes. We also contribute methodologically by proposing Dewey’s Inquiry as a guide to shadowing the bounded becomingness of projects-as-practice (verb). Using an empirical illustration from a Health and Social Care Partnership in Scotland, we highlight the inherently emergent nature of projects as they bring about transformational change.

Legal Pragmatism – A Useful and Adequate Explanatory Model for Danish Adjudication on Tax Avoidance?1

Abstract The author explores whether legal pragmatism may function as a useful and adequate explanatory model for the case law on tax avoidance unfolding in the Danish Supreme Court. In doing so, the underlying ideas of philosophical and legal pragmatism are initially re-visited while the general interpretational approach of the Danish judiciary is briefly outlined. Subsequently, the general approach to interpretation of Danish tax law is presented and the prevailing opinions on tax avoidance in the Danish doctrine are touched upon. This provide the necessary foundation for the following legal analysis of the Danish Supreme Courts’ case law on tax avoidance. Based on this analysis, it is concluded that legal pragmatism may actually function as a useful and adequate explanatory model for the Danish Supreme Court's case law on tax avoidance. Awareness of this pragmatic inclination may facilitate a better understanding of the Danish Supreme Court's approach in difficult cases on tax avoidance and enhance the possibilities of predicting the outcome of such cases.

Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime by James Maynard

Reviewed by: Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime by James Maynard Joshua Hoeynck James Maynard, Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2018. 211 pp. Cloth, $65. Of the many exciting developments in post-1945 American poetry scholarship over the course of the last several years, the continual release of new publications from the University of New Mexico Press’s Recencies Series (edited by Matthew Hofer) has been one of the richest. With the publication of James Maynard’s Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime, the Recencies Series has filled a major gap in criticism on Robert Duncan and the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance. Maynard delineates three historical phases of Duncan’s career— characterized by surrealism, a poetics of organism, and a final French turn— while coordinating the ideas and [End Page 106] methods in Duncan’s writing with the pragmatist philosophies of John Dewey, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead. Duncan consistently read these philosophers throughout his life and used their cosmological worldviews to create “larger and increasingly complex structures in an attempt to make a poetics adequate to the excess of experience and the experience of excess,” as Maynard argues (33). Although Duncan made many explicit statements concerning his appreciative deployment of pragmatist ideas to conceive a relational and heterogenetic poetics that tries and fails to catch this excessive nature of the real, and although those statements clarify the central role American pragmatist philosophies played in Duncan’s imagination, many remain unpublished. That is to say that only James Maynard could have written this invaluable book. As Curator of the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo, Maynard has been and continues to be well positioned to articulate unique perspectives on Duncan’s writing, his influences, and his unpublished manuscripts. I first met James as a graduate student while researching Duncan’s correspondences, and like many other scholars who write about Duncan and the San Francisco Renaissance, I have benefited from his encyclopedic knowledge of Duncan’s sources over the years. That said, Maynard’s book does not merely coordinate concepts or philologically chart Duncan’s allusions to Whitehead, James, and Dewey. Engaging theory and poetry, Maynard’s first chapter develops the innovative concept of a “pragmatist sublime” through an extended intellectual history. In this account Whitehead’s process metaphysics and James’s pluralism contend with Kant’s and Lyotard’s negative sublime and subjectivism. Maynard thus diversifies the sublime, complicating its frozen image in the Kantian tradition “as an epistemological indeterminacy buttressing (or, in the case of certain postmodern versions, challenging) an autonomous subject” (14). In contrast to the subjective versions of the sublime, Maynard shows that Duncan adhered to and advanced the concept of the sublime “as a pluralistic, ontological, and relational phenomenon of experience” (14). This knowledgeable and well-drawn intervention makes this book not only useful for scholars of American poetry but also for students invested in theory, conflicting philosophical traditions, and influence studies. [End Page 107] The book’s following chapters apply the concept of the pragmatist sublime to three overlapping phases of Duncan’s career, investigating his early engagement with surrealism (about which almost no other scholarship exists), the development of his mature poetics of organism through his transformations of Whitehead and James, and finally the darker turn toward the French language and the void of Duncan’s last poems. The well-written analysis of these historical phases widens scholarly knowledge of Duncan’s poems while also unearthing the conceptual relationship between American philosophy and American poetry. Along the way readers well-versed in the influence that Whitehead wielded over projective poetry will find many intellectual matters with which to engage. Does the book too quickly dismiss Charles Olson’s first use of Whitehead and Olson’s subsequent influence on Duncan? Is Maynard’s attempt to coordinate continental philosophy with Duncan’s later poetics valid in light of the earlier pragmatist analysis? Although engaging critical questions like these will emerge for readers deeply invested in the finer points of projective verse and process philosophy, the book’s overall portrait of the intimate relationship between pragmatist strains of thought and Duncan’s avant-garde, projective practice is a...

A new ontology of reasons for inferentialism: redefining the notion of conceptualization and proposing an observer effect on assessment

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new ontology of reasons for inferentialism. The existing inferentialist approach to mathematics education has a methodological challenge in retrospective analysis and a noncollaborative issue stems from a narrow view of learning. The proposed ontology, built on a radical interpretation of the inferentialist idea of conceptual pragmatism, enables us to maintain philosophical consistency on the basis of the distinction between students’ reasons and the observer’s perspectives, on the one hand, and dealing with the collaborative nature of classroom mathematical activities without assuming the knowledge to be learned as given. In order to build the ontology, the authors will redefine the notion of conceptualization as a judgment and claim that only articulated reasons exist and that unarticulated reasons are vague and variable. The shift in the ontological perspective requires us to reject a kind of retrospective analysis. In this regard, we should consider the impact of the observer effect on the assessment of conceptual development: This effect implies that it is not until a person is asked to provide her reason that her reason comes to exist. Finally, the authors will derive implications from the ontology: the teachers’ dual roles of enhancing students’ conceptualization and of assessing their current conceptual development and the implicit connection between inferentialist approaches and design research.

Elaborating the sensory and cognitive-affective aspects of information experience

Drawing on pragmatist ideas proposed by John Dewey, the study elaborates the picture of information experience by examining how researchers have characterized the ways in which people receive, acquire and interpret sensory and cognitive-affective information. To this end, a conceptual analysis was conducted by concentrating on 43 studies pertinent to the topic. The findings indicate that so far, the construct of information experience has remained quite vague. This is mainly due to that experience - the fundamental constituent of information experience – has not been sufficiently reflected in the context of informational phenomena. Information experience studies have mainly contributed to information behaviour research by describing how people receive and acquire sensory information, while the picture of experiencing cognitive-affective information has remained quite vague. There are also gaps in studies examining how sensory and cognitive-affective information are interpreted as an integral part of information experience. The study also identifies topics of further research dealing with the elaboration of the construct of information experience.

Equality Beyond Debate: John Dewey’s Pragmatic Idea of Democracy. By Jeff Jackson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 306p. $105.00 cloth.

Equality Beyond Debate: John Dewey’s Pragmatic Idea of Democracy. By Jeff Jackson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 306p. $105.00 cloth.

The Body and the Production of Phenomena in the Science Laboratory

This article deals with science content “in the making” and in particular the role of the body in producing scientific phenomena. While accounts of scientists’ work have repeatedly demonstrated, how producing phenomena requires immense amounts of time and effort, involving tinkering and manual labor, this is a little empirically studied content in science education. Seeking to shed light on how the body is involved with materiality to produce physics phenomena, and in what terms this is learning physics content, the article first examines how bodily tinkering is a necessary part of knowing physics through reviewing major accounts of science studies and research in science education. Secondly, drawing on phenomenology and pragmatist ideas, the article examines how students’ bodies need to be educated in the transactional process with material and artifacts to produce phenomena in the context of science learning in lower secondary physics education. Demonstrating that embodied phenomena production is an inescapable part of learning scientific inquiry, and that bodies are just as much a part of the subject physics as conceptual knowledge, we suggest that the education of students’ bodies needs to be made an explicit content. This is important not only for making tacit content accessible to all, but also for addressing epistemological understandings of what science and technology is about.

Brandom and Wittgenstein: Disagreements on how to be in agreement with a rule

This paper offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks that discusses the meaning of being in practical agreement with a rule, arguing that Brandom misconstrues the idea undergirding Wittgenstein’s remarks in terms of the relation between the pragmatic and normative aspects of language. First, I discuss Brandom’s idea of normative pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. I argue that Brandom enforces the picture of implicit rules as a salient solution for the problem of infinite regress regarding explicit rules. Second, I compare both views and show that although Brandom takes his solution for a Wittgensteinian answer to the regress problem it is very likely that Wittgenstein’s understanding of rule-following rather suggests a different view. Moreover, I explain why Brandom thinks that he cannot accept this view and why he offers an interpretation-based account instead which he thinks is underlying the agreement between rule and practice. Third, I criticize Brandom’s account from a Wittgensteinian point of view arguing that what is underlying the agreement are so-called ‘bedrock-practices’ rather than mutual interpretations.

Exploring the knowledge practices of psychology: Reflections on a field study

The epistemic project of psychology is currently under intense and broad debate. As a contribution to this debate—and as a deliberate attempt to steer the debate towards a more situated and material understanding of epistemology—this article presents a 2-month anthropological field study of how knowledge was produced among a group of psychologists in a psychology department at a Danish university. First, the article presents a detailed account of how this particular group of (cultural-historical) psychologists constructed knowledge in their daily practices. Second, the article discusses these specific knowledge practices in relation to a selection of contemporary pragmatic ideas about research, knowledge, and theorising. Finally, the article discusses how the study of this particular case of knowledge production may contribute to the broad current debates about psychology’s contemporary epistemic project and its role in society.

THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS OF THE LEISURE ACTIVITIES IN THE CULTURE OF THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT

The purpose of the research is to identify the suppositions and factors that form the base of the enlightenment model of the leisure activities. Methodology of the research lies in the usage of a set of systemic, historical and chronological and hermeneutical methods. Scientific novelty of the research is grounded with the origin of the pragmatic approach to the assessment of the leisure activities and leisure practices in the period of Enlightenment. Conclusions. It is proved that the formation of the Enlightenment model of the leisure activities was influenced by such tendencies as the acknowledgement of the leading role of science among other kinds of cognitive activity and the cult of Mind, absolutization of education that formed the belief in the possibility of solving social problems, provided the appropriate conditions for this; deism and secularization of worldview, which led to the denial of religious fanaticism and blind faith in to Church dogmas; social stratification of society. That’s why there were dominated such leisure practices that were aimed at the objective cognition of the reality and were based onto the pragmatic ideas.

Features of relationships of patients and the doctor in the clinic of tuberculosis

With the scientific, technological and industrial potential of humanity on the rise, as well as advancement in the ability to improve the environment and significantly change its conditions of existence, the moral question of our exact actions becomes more acute. As time goes, more meaning is given to the concepts and values of humanity. Formerly, if the dominating principles in culture were based off of religious, esthetic and utilitarian-practical values, as well as curiosity, then today, the main principles for the well being of humanity should be dictated by ethics, as they will be crucial for the development of both culture and society.Other than moral and ethical individual qualities, a doctor must have the required professional training, have the skills and knowledge needed in practice, know how to adequately evaluate the patient as well as their own practical abilities and risks, be able to endure and have confidence in their own capabilities, as well as have communicative aspects — such as personal appeal, kindness, respect for surrounding people, tactfulness, being observant, available, and trustful, as well as being able to obtain trust easily. However, despite the considerable amount of doctors who patients avoid, or only visit in dire need, a large amount of practitioners not only effectively do their job, but also come close to the depiction of the «perfect doctor». Our opinion is that psychological preparation as well the doctors readiness is of utmost importance. Physicians should have affection to both the ill and the healthy. Concerning the ill, doctors must feel more respect and be more understanding. First of all, any emotion might harm rational thinking, thus worsen potential results of intervention. Second, we inherently don’t want to harm our loved ones, this way close relationships might inhibit both diagnostics and treatment. In current conditions with the popularity of nihilistic and pragmatic ideas in society, the refusal of moral constructs creates certain professional, social and juristic problems. The issue of medical ethics and deontology has become more acute in the end of the previous century. This happened on the back of changes in the sphere of social economics and medicine, fueled by low pay rates, improper financing and the creation of a market in the field, something that isn’t characteristic of medicine. Growing are occurrences of dehumanization, as well as the distance between doctor and patient expanding, which is caused by new laboratory research methods and instrumental diagnostics.

Sociological Jurisprudence and Legal Realism as a Basis for the Development of Judicial Law-Making

The aim of the present work is to study the role of sociological jurisprudence and legal realism for the development of judicial law making in the modern legal system. During the study, the author used general scientific methods, including historical, comparative, and logical ones. An analysis of legal documents was also performed, which allowed making conclusions about trends in the Russian legal system.
 The study showed that sociological jurisprudence and the realistic school of law of the United States were milestones of the development of the same socio-legal school. It was determined that the supporters of sociological trends could be attributed to the moderate direction of the American sociological legal school, and the legal realists – to the radical one. The basis of the socio-legal school is formed by the ideas of pragmatism, which are expressed in the functional and instrumental approach to the law. One of the basic tenets of the proponents of socio-legal school is the following: the law shall harmonize the interests, actually act and be implemented in the activities of the court. Views of sociologists of law contributed to the approval of the idea of judicial law making not only within the Anglo-American legal family but also in the legal systems of the Romano-Germanic legal family. They drew attention to the process of decision-making by the court, the process of setting up the rule of law by the court.
 The novelty of this research is that we have identified not only the influence of supporters of sociological school of law on the beginning of the new phase in the development of law, but also that the process was legitimate, and representatives of the scientific direction were able not only to recognize the pattern of ongoing legal development but also tried to steer the process in the right direction, so that the law would not lose its regulatory function and would not become a soulless mechanism in the hands of law enforcers.

Capitalism goes care

PurposeThe starting point of the paper is the meteoric rise of care and care work upon the societal and sociological agenda. Referring to Polanyi, the authors argue that this is the manifestation of a new phase of capitalist societalisation (Vergesellschaftung) of social reproduction in the form of an economic shift. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the societal organisation of care and care work and questions of inequality and justice.Design/methodology/approachThe first part of the paper illustrates some facets of the economic shift in the field of care and care work. The second part reconstructs the societal organisation of care and care work in the private sector, state, third sector and private households from the mid-twentieth century in the context of questions of inequality and justice. The third part draws on the institutional logics perspective and French pragmatic sociology and the own case studies on home care agencies (HCA), residential care communities (RCC) and early child care (ECC) in Austria and Germany and shows how conflicting demands give rise to new questions of justice. The paper ends with a short conclusion.FindingsThe paper shows how the commodification and de-commodification of care and care work have changed over time and how the economic shift – illustrated in the case of HCA, RCC and ECC – is accompanied by conflicting demands and questions of justice.Originality/valueA Polanyian perspective on the relation between market and society is combined with the neo-institutionalist and pragmatic idea that orientations rooted in the “logics” of the market, the state, the family and the profession influence how conflicting demands in elder and child care are dealt with and how questions of inequality and justice arise.

Child cancers: managing the complications of childhood chemotherapy in the adult dentition

Abstract: Young children who are unfortunate enough to suffer from a malignant disease are often treated with chemotherapy. This selectively toxic treatment keeps them alive but, in many cases, the effects on the developing dental structures can be very serious. Robust evidence is limited on how to manage the dental issues of the surviving patients later on in their lives. This article demonstrates some interesting malformations of teeth produced by the malignant disease or by the chemotherapy early in life. It offers some pragmatic ideas on solving some of these dental problems without destroying the already much reduced tooth tissue. CPD/Clinical Relevance: This article enables clinicians to appreciate the long-term effects of chemotherapy on the dental development of young cancer victims and outlines subsequent management using minimally destructive, pragmatic, bonded composite restorations.

Force, Nonviolence, and Communication in the Pragmatism of Bhimrao Ambedkar

ABSTRACT This article argues that we should take the philosophical thought of Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Indian politician and advocate for “untouchable” rights, seriously as part of the pragmatist tradition. Doing so will reveal the international impact of pragmatist thought and will contribute to current concerns over how citizens should communicate and pursue advocacy in pluralistic societies. As a student of Dewey's, Ambedkar took pragmatist ideas of democracy and integrated them into his reading of Buddhism. His reconstruction of nonviolence (ahimsa) as love of one's friends and enemies leaves him open to criticisms from those favoring revolutionary means to achieve social justice. The final section considers criticisms stemming from insurrectionist ethics and argues that Ambedkar operates as an important emancipatory counter to this position. Ambedkar's pragmatism holds back from violent means, as they tend to destroy too many people and valued ends that one needs for an ideal democratic community.

John Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Techno-Scientific Development: Its Implications to Man and Society

This work sought to examine the implications of John Dewey’s instrumentalism on techno-scientific development. Instrumentalism is John Dewey’s aspect of pragmatism. Dewey’s idea of pragmatism is anthropomorphic naturalism. Anthropomorphic naturalism is an argument for a reconsideration of the place of man in the world through some adjustments in the practice of science. In the view of John Dewey, scientific findings have extended the confines of man as an end in itself. Dewey was convinced that there is a gap between the desire to improve man’s wellbeing through scientific discoveries and inventions and the commitment to ensure that these improvements do not consistently threaten the well being of man and his environment. This referred to as abysmal gap between the theory of science which focuses on the wellbeing of man and his environment, and the practice of science which ignores this wellbeing in the long term. Thus, a question deserves our attention: “Do we continue with this ‘pull’ to discover and invent, even to our own detriment while ignoring the evident fact that this ‘pull’, when not monitored by values and principles, portend danger for mankind as fictitiously represented in Frankenstein’s monster?” The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the theory of science which focuses on the wellbeing of man and environment, and the practice of science which ignores this wellbeing in the long term. His idea of anthropomorphic naturalism draws attention to the need to integrate values into the practice of science. This work posits that Dewey’s pragmatic or humanistic naturalism offers a solution to the existing paradox of advancement for self harm or destruction.

On Confucian Metaphysics, The Pragmatist Revolution, and Philosophy of Music Education

Within the last few decades, scholars have uncovered remarkable similarities between Confucian and pragmatist philosophies. Given these resonances, how would a philosophy of music education founded on a synthesis of Confucian and pragmatist ideas look? How would such a philosophy compare with extant philosophies of music education? In this paper, I sketch Confucian and pragmatist metaphysics, meld ideas from the two philosophies, and proffer implications for music education. As I shall argue, a Confucian-pragmatist intercultural blend lends support to three historical movements in the philosophy of music education: the cultivation of morality through music, music education as aesthetic education, and the praxial philosophy of music education. It also illumines extant philosophies of music education in fresh ways. This essay extends a line of research on the application of comparative philosophy in contemporary music education.

Методологический прагматизм проблемно-ориентированного обучения математике

The article is devoted to problem-oriented teaching of higher mathematics based on a problem-based approach to specific tasks and the idea of ​​methodological pragmatism, which is expressed in criticism of the idea of ​​absolute justification of mathematics and educational argumentation.

A survey on automation of security requirements in service-based business processes

Service-oriented computing (SOC) and business process management (BPM) are essential topics in computer science. Companies are widely adopting business process standards, such as BPMN, to model their business processes, while automatise them by using services from the SOC world. The automation leads to a gain of efficiency in executing business processes and facilitates the execution of tests. However, the automation also raises fundamental security concerns, especially considering that it can use external services available on the internet, e.g., web services. For example, companies are not comfortable to use systems that communicate over the internet without guarantees that secure actions have been adequately used. The main objective of this work is to provide a holistic view of current initiatives and tools to model and enforce security requirements in service-based business processes along with open research and practical challenges on this subject. The intention is that this work can serve as a source of theoretical and pragmatic ideas for those who want to execute their business processes having in mind security concerns.

Perception Pragmatized: a Pragmatic Reconciliation of Representationalism and Relationalism

This paper develops a theory of perception that reconciles representationalism and relationalism by relying on pragmatist ideas. I call it the pragmatic view of perception. I argue that fully reconciling representationalism and relationalism requires, first, providing a theory in which how we perceive the world involves representations; second, preserving the idea that perception is constitutively shaped by its objects; and third, offering a direct realist account of perception. This constitutes what I call the Hybrid Triad. I discuss how Charles Peirce’s theory of perception can provide a framework for such a view and I devote the rest of the paper to developing my own pragmatic and Peircean theory of perception. In particular, I argue that considering perception as a continuous temporal process, which essentially involves interaction with the environment, allows us to do justice to the Hybrid Triad. I motivate this view by discussing how a pragmatic theory of perception would deal with issues such as the distinction between veridical and non-veridical experiences and the nature of perceptual objects.