Pragmatic Turn Research Articles

Pragmatism as the foundation of cognitive enactivism

The current prevailing embodied cognitive science is essentially the result of the pragmatic turn of cognitive science, and enactivism is the epitome of this turn. For a long time, most advocates of enactivism have consciously regarded phenomenology as their important source of thought but ignored its pragmatic roots. In fact, there are many similarities between enactivism and pragmatism, and pragmatism has foreshadowed some core ideas and principles of enactivism. In particular, enactivism contains a pragmatic assumption that there is interaction between organisms and their environment, and cognitive ability is evolved and developed by organisms in the history of interactions with their environment. Their interpretations of cognition both rely on the theoretical support of biology and emphasize the basic role of organisms’ active capacities and environment in the formation of cognition. They hold a neutral monism position ontologically. Undoubtedly, pragmatism is the precursor of cognitive enactivism. Pragmatism not only provides rich conceptual resources for the development of enactivism, but also provides a unique perspective and method to solve some problems in its theory. Pragmatism is a rich mine for enactivists to further explore.

The Public Interest in Environmental Decision-Making: A Pragmatist Turn

Abstract This study is concerned with a central question in administrative law, as well as environmental law; that is, how to conceptualise and determine the public interest in complex contexts where decisions concern collective action problems, involve multiple actors, cross-temporal and spatial scales, and occur under conditions of knowledge uncertainty. Here, it is argued against the use of trade-offs in the determination of the public interest in these contexts because trade-offs involve epistemological simplifications and de-contextualise interests dismissing the nature of knowledge as a situated and dynamic collective practice. To concretise the critique, the EU Habitats Directive’s site protection management provisions are relied on as an example where decisions in the public interest are underpinned by a problematic trade-off logic. To move beyond trade-offs, the article introduces Dewey’s thought. More precisely, it is argued that Dewey’s deliberative pragmatism presents a cogent conceptualisation of the public interest, and thereby constitutes a first intellectual step to overcome the key limitations of a trade-off logic in determining the public interest in environmental decision-making.

The future of UN peace operations: pragmatism, pluralism or statism?

Abstract Although United Nations peace missions have played an important conflict management role for decades, a backlash against the post-Cold War model of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ and other recent developments have called their future into doubt. Some observers contend that a ‘pragmatic turn’ is now underway—a shift away from ambitious plans to transform war-torn societies into liberal democracies and towards more modest and realistic goals. Whether ‘pragmatism’ offers a viable alternative framework for peacebuilding, however, is less clear. This article challenges key assumptions of the pragmatic approach to peacebuilding, including the notion that UN missions can be ‘agnostic’ about the governance arrangements of societies that host these operations, as some proponents of pragmatism recommend. Historical case-studies show that such assumptions are integral features of collective conflict management systems, including UN peace missions. Moreover, a close examination of the pragmatist approach reveals that it, too, is based on such assumptions—namely, that building peace requires the promotion of pluralist societies and states. Pluralist peacebuilding, the article concludes, could offer a compelling foundation for future UN missions in an era of rising statist–authoritarianism, but developing this approach will first require discarding pragmatism's pretence of ideological agnosticism.

Crossing the Trust Gap in Medical AI: Building an Abductive Bridge for xAI

In this paper, we argue that one way to approach what is known in the literature as the “Trust Gap” in Medical AI is to focus on explanations from an Explainable AI (xAI) perspective. Against the current framework on xAI – which does not offer a real solution – we argue for a pragmatist turn, one that focuses on understanding how we provide explanations in Traditional Medicine (TM), composed by human agents only. Following this, explanations have two specific relevant components: they are usually (i) social and (ii) abductive. Explanations, in this sense, ought to provide understanding by answering contrastive why-questions: “Why had P happened instead of Q?” (Miller in AI 267:1–38, 2019) (Sect. 1). In order to test the relevancy of this concept of explanation in medical xAI, we offer several reasons to argue that abductions are crucial for medical reasoning and provide a crucial tool to deal with trust gaps between human agents (Sect. 2). If abductions are relevant in TM, we can test the capability of Artificial Intelligence systems on this merit. Therefore, we provide an analysis of the capacity for social and abductive reasoning of different AI technologies. Accordingly, we posit that Large Language Models (LLMs) and transformer architectures exhibit a noteworthy potential for effective engagement in abductive reasoning. By leveraging the potential abductive capabilities of LLMs and transformers, we anticipate a paradigm shift in the integration of explanations within AI systems. This, in turn, has the potential to enhance the trustworthiness of AI-driven medical decisions, bridging the Trust Gap that has been a prominent challenge in the field of Medical AI (Sect. 3). This development holds the potential to not only improve the interpretability of AI-generated medical insights but also to guarantee that trust among practitioners, patients, and stakeholders in the healthcare domain is still present.

Inquiring Value: The Pragmatist Turn in Business Ethics

Inquiring Value: The Pragmatist Turn in Business Ethics

In Defence of the Indefensible: Exploring Justification Narratives of Corporate Elites Accused of Corruption

AbstractDrawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and inspired widespread public condemnation. Publicly accessible archival documents, such as court reporting, newspaper stories, press conferences, and the digital footprints of corporate elites implicated in the scandals provide data for our inquiry. Focussing on the juxtaposition of ‘sayings’ and ‘doings’, the findings show justification as performative, and rooted in contextual pragmatism that acknowledges the plurality of logics situated between self-interest and folk-logic. Within this framework, the domestic and civic orders of worth emerge as most prominent, with the justification processes manifesting through victimising, scapegoating, and crusading. Building on these insights, we develop a framework that highlights how the use of justifications serves as a critique of the inadequacies within climates of weak institutional frameworks consequently fostering an atmosphere conducive to framing unethical conducts as morally acceptable.

General trends in the development of American historiography in line with the pragmatic turn

General trends in the development of American historiography in line with the pragmatic turn

Revisiting political pragmatism and education

By placing John Dewey between John Rawls and Richard Bernstein, I argue for a socialist reading of Dewey’s takes on liberal democracy that moves away both from conservative readings of Dewey of those who claim that his democratic liberalism actually belongs to right-wing or center views, and from left-wing, communitarians who dismiss such views as irrelevant for socialist and radical variants of liberal democracy. Overall, it can be shown that Rawls and Dewey’s different takes on political liberalism could be ultimately reconciled, given their similar takes on democracy, pluralism, and the person. Rawls’ rehabilitation of Kant can itself be shown to be closely related to his reading of Dewey. Furthermore, as Bernstein argues, such a renewal of Dewey’s social and political philosophy in Rawls’s political constructivism and reflective equilibrium was decisive for the great pragmatist turn observed in the second, third, and fourth generations of critical theory, not only in the so-called Frankfurt School (especially Habermas, Honneth, Forst) but also in feminist and decolonial thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Rahel Jaeggi, and Amy Allen. Dewey’s pragmatist turn in political philosophy allows thus for a dynamic, robust correlation between radical democracy and public education, which could be implemented in emerging democracies like Brazil.

Misrepresenting Pragmatism: Response to Greenhalgh and Engebretsen

The Covid-19 pandemic has engendered intense public debate about the nature and place of a “science-driven” approach to decision making in such contexts, with contributions by a range of scientific authors critical of actual policy decisions. In a recent article in this journal, Greenhalgh and Engebretsen (TGEE) propose that science-driven policymaking should be abandoned in favour of a “Pragmatist turn”. We critically analyze their portrayal of Pragmatism and demonstrate that their characterization is historically inaccurate, particularly focusing on the neglect of its strong commitment to scientific method and related evidential requirements. We conclude that Pragmatism's caution and respect for standards of evidence are a valuable corrective to the pandemics of fear and action that bias responses to any pandemic infection.

About the Medialogical Understanding of the Concept of “Book Culture”

The concept of “book culture”, which entered the domestic book-study discourse in the 1980s, is currently one of the central ones for both historical-book and theoretical-book studies. However, it has not yet received a conventional definition in Russian science. The purpose of the article is to formulate a definition of book culture based on the interpretative theory of culture and theoretical and methodological achievements of medialogy dominating in modern socio-humanitarian knowledge. The authors show the general theoretical context of the formation of the concept of “book culture”. The necessity of a pragmatic turn in theoretical book studies is substantiated. The possibilities of theoretical models of the media researcher G.M. McLuhan and the historian of the printed book R. Darnton for the interpretation of the concept of “book culture” are revealed. The author offers his own definition of book culture as a space of communication between various social actors, mediated by materialized texts broadcasting socially significant information.

Global Fragmentation and Collective Security Instruments: Weakening the Liberal International Order From Within

Collective instruments, such as UN peacekeeping or mediation, are a lens through which we can examine broader normative fault lines in the international order. They hold both practical and symbolic value. In the post-Cold War moment, these instruments started reflecting liberal values. They became concerned with balancing the rights of individuals and state sovereignty. These advances around “human protection” are now in question, with contestation perceived as emerging from non-Western powers. I contribute to the debates on the “pragmatic turn” within collective responses but contend that while the focus in current debates about the normative shift has become global fragmentation, the momentum for the de-prioritization of human protection within collective instruments comes from within the liberal order itself. Human protection is now a broadly shared and firmly entrenched norm, but to shield the norm from abuse, the collective international community progressively restricted any use of force to advance the norm within the instrument of UN peacekeeping. The co-optation of UN peacekeeping into counter-terrorism efforts and the introduction of stabilization mandates undermined the principled nature and moral authority of the instrument of peacekeeping itself. This, in turn, compromised the implementation of human protection. This development is now accelerated and exposed due to global fragmentation, influencing not just peacekeeping but also other adjacent activities, such as mediation.

Gaze and reflexivity in postcolonial cinema: the pragmatic turn in critical tourism studies

This article examines the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical integration of postcolonial cinema into critical tourism education. These works help viewers understand the influence of film as a primary source of postcolonial gaze, with the goal of decolonizing tourism studies. Postcolonial cinema reconnects geographic inquiry with the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism on people and places in specific localities and across regions. Critical pragmatism is presented as synthesizing critical theory’s emphasis on listening, reflecting, and deliberating and traditional pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and place, as well as mixed research methods and multiple realities. Critical reflexivity is explored in critical tourism studies as relocated in pragmatist thought and a basis for abductive methodology and pedagogy. Abductive methodology is identified as a basis for addressing complex tourism issues and researcher positioning, while abductive pedagogy creates transformative learning environments where shared dialogue generates new knowledge. Critical pragmatism, enriched with gaze and reflexivity honed through postcolonial cinema, addresses perceived ontological and ‘realist’ deficiencies in critical tourism studies, while offering an alternative philosophical framework for informing and contrasting popular epistemologies and methodologies.

A pragmatic turn in the philosophy of language in the context of problems of preservation and development of minority languages

By the beginning of the twenty-first century essentialism is giving way to the constructivist paradigm in the field of social sciences and humanities. However, linguistic essentialism survived all the shocks and received a classical form in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism. The application of this hypothesis to the analysis of linguistic communities puts majority and minority languages in different positions: it makes strong languages even stronger, and simply kills small ones. The task of preserving minority languages in programs built using this methodology turns out to be impossible. In our humble opinion, two research paradigms are more adequate for the purpose. One of them is associated with the pragmatic turn in the analytical philosophy of language and represents a transition from the analysis of the structure of the language itself to the analysis of the conditions of communication, taking into account all the sociocultural components of this process. The second methodology is Erving Goff man’s concept of social face and performative behavior.

Rediscovering classics: Robert Darnton’s communications circuit

Many scholars point to the crisis in the Russian bibliology. Meanwhile, those involved in the discussion specify the origins of the crisis in the discipline differently. One possible way to overcome the theoretical crisis of bibliology is to turn to Robert Darnton’s conceptual model of communications circuit. Robert Darnton is well known for his studies in the history of book culture of the modern era yet his model, which has long been recognized as a classic in international historical book studies, has been ignored by Russian bibliologists. The author describes the model that contemplates to identify agents of book communications; the sustained interactions between the agents structure and reproduce the world of book culture. The methodological context of the “pragmatic turn” that defines the model-based concept of book culture based on Clifford Geertz’s semiotic theory of culture, is revised. Possible ways of adapting Darnton’s model to the subsequent stages of media development are outlined. The communications circuit model offers research optics to consider book culture as the communicative wholeness within which the book serves as a medium to facilitate social interactions between different agents involved in the book communication process. Application of Darnton’s model would provide a new research agenda and its incorporation into the relevant international scholarly context.

Journey to Pragmatism: The History of the American Religious Right in the ‘90s

The article analyses the political history of the American Religious Right in the nineties. It will be argued that conservative Christian political organizations achieved greater influence on partisan and national agenda by undergoing a pragmatic turn in structure, rhetoric and strategies. The uncompromising behavior of the eighties gave way to a gradual approach with a give-and-take logic. The article will pay attention to abortion as perhaps the most pressing issue at the time among conservative Christians. For its analysis the article relies on contributions published on Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American Evangelicalism.

The Vagueness of Ordinary Language and Its Impact on the Pragmatic Turn

The significant contribution of ordinary language to the pragmatic turn in analytic philosophy has received a great deal of attention from philosophers and linguists, but there is still a gap in the special study of the influence of ordinary language on the pragmatic turn from the perspective of its vagueness. On the basis of the fact that ideal language cannot portray the reality of some linguistic facts, this article compares and analyzes the differences between ideal language and ordinary language in terms of vagueness, and further argue that ordinary language cannot exist in the process of language use in isolation from the reality of the situation through three subdivisions of vagueness: roughness, ambiguity, and incompleteness. The vagueness creates the opportunities for language to be used in a way that is closely tied to the actual situation, dismantling the artificially shaped conditions of perfect use of the ideal language and redirecting the philosophers' attention to the concrete elaboration of language. In this manner, philosophy's concern of ordinary language use and the subjective experience of language users coincides with pragmatics and further drives philosophy to take a pragmatic turn.

What are We to Do with ‘Muslim Subjectivity’? Prospects and Pitfalls of the Research Approach in a Historiographical Context

The author discusses, in the historiographical context, problems posed by the growing wave of research on the “history of Muslim subjectivity.” Noting the paradoxical danger of the reorientalization of and the loss of historicity in Islamic studies, the author insists on the importance of the very designation of the emerging approach and suggests as a more correct term “history of Muslim subjectivities”. Some aspects of the nowadays’ interpretations of the interaction between the individual and the social and cultural in history, of the role of agency and subjecthood of historical actors are considered, as well as the correlation between persona studies and studies of the “techniques of the self.” Proceeding from the approaches that presume the “return of the subject,” the author emphasizes the expediency, for the studies of Muslim subjectivities, of microhistorical approaches, in particular, the “pragmatic turn” and the Russian version of microhistory with its characteristic attention to the individual and its complex vision of the historical context.

Heidegger and Patočka on the Primacy of Practices and Phenomenological Pragmatism

In this paper, I will argue that J. Patočka’s conception of three movements of human existence can be considered a contribution to the “pragmatic turn” in phenomenology. In order to demonstrate this contribution, I will first recapitulate the context of pragmatic turn, outlining both Heidegger’s original position and its consequent pragmatic interpretation offered by H. Dreyfus and other scholars. The core of the pragmatic interpretation is based on a modification of the Primacy of Praxis thesis that can be described as the Primacy of Practices thesis, according to which our background practices, i.e., the ‘contingent ways of acting and judging,’ operate as a “source” of intelligibility. Based on Patočka’s criticisms, I will further argue that Heidegger-inspired pragmatism is hampered by the opposition between authentic and inauthentic disclosure, leading to both the rigidification of everyday practices and rendering authentic disclosure formal and empty. In the final section, I will demonstrate that Patočka’s own conception of the three movements of existence can be seen as committed to the Primacy of Practices thesis and that this version of the Primacy of Practice thesis is more acceptable because it does not share the disdainful attitude in regards of the public world.

Pragmatic Peacekeeping in a Multipolar Era: Liberal Norms, Practices, and the Future of UN Peace Operations

ABSTRACT As UN peacekeeping continues to move through a period of change and rupture, we conceptualise this turn as ‘pragmatic’ and take interest in its normative dimensions. In this introduction to a Special Issue, we take stock of scholarship on this pragmatic turn, arguing that it can be enriched through deeper engagement with theories of norms and practices, drawing especially on pragmatist approaches in the field of International Relations. We also argue that, while pragmatic peacekeeping may be less ideologically ambitious than earlier iterations of the practice, it still has a strong normative dimension.

Refugee Return, Reintegration, and Sustainable Futurity: Politics, Pitfalls and Possibilities of Repatriation in Post/Conflict Situations

ABSTRACT With conflict and displacement among the most pressing issues of our time, refugee repatriation and reintegration are integral to post-conflict development and enduring peace. Regarded by the UN as a durable solution, repatriation has come to be viewed as the most viable option given the prevailing global landscape of increased displacement and stringency of national policies towards asylum seekers. These realities have also engendered a pragmatic turn from the principle of voluntariness to an emphasis on safety and the politicisation of the humanitarian agenda that destabilise the foundational principles of the refugee protection regime. Drawing upon the experiences of the Cambodian refugee repatriation in 1992–93, the more recent repatriation of Burmese refugees1 from Thailand and insights from other instances of return, this paper examines the politics, pitfalls, and possibilities of Southeast Asian refugee repatriation following political settlements, prompted as they were by political and other exigencies rather than the restoration of peace and stability. With attention to the relationships between refugees, refugee originating and receiving countries, and the UNHCR, it underscores the predicament, ambivalence, and dismissal that undergird refugee return. It interrogates notions of voluntariness in the context of constrained choice, and of safe and dignified return, citizenship, and belonging in the context of fragile peace. It also reflects on the delimitation of accountability by the changing status of refugees when they re-crossed the border and argues for looking at repatriation and re-integration as a continuum, and for centering sustainability and the restoration of refugee futurity in the discourse of return.