Nauman Rasheed

RATIONALISM In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is “any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification”. In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory “in which the creation of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive”. Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderation position “that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge” to the more extreme position that reason is “the unique path to knowledge”. Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In recent decades, Leo Strauss sought to revive “Classical Political Rationalism should not be confused with rationality, not with rationalization. In politics, rationalism is a development of the Enlightenment that emphasizes a “politics of reason” centered upon support of the concepts of rational choice, utilitarianism, secularism and irreligion; this has especially been promoted by liberalism. Background of Rationalism Since the Enlightenment, rationalism is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy, as in Descartes Leibniz, and Spinoza. This is commonly called continental rationalism, because it was predominant in the continental schools of Europe, whereas in Britain empiricism dominated. Rationalism is often contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can be both rationalist and empiricist. Taken to extremes the empiricist view holds that all ideas come to us through experience, either through the external senses or through such inner sensations as pain the gratification, and thus that knowledge is essentially based on or derived from experience. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and the proper techniques for verifying what we think we know. Proponents of some varieties of rationalism argue that, starting with foundational basic principles, like the axioms of geometry, one could deductively derive the rest of all possible knowledge. The philosophers who held this view most clearly were Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, whose attempts to grapple with the epistemological and metaphysical problems raised by Descartes led to a development of the fundamental approach of rationalism. Both Spinoza and Leibniz asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, though they both observed that this was not possible in practice for human beings, except in specific areas such as mathematics. On the other hand, Leibniz admitted in his book Monadology that “we are all more Empirics in three fourths of our actions. Rationalism is predicting and explaining behavior based on logic. Philosophical usage The distinction between rationalists and empiricists was drawn at a later period, and would not have been recognized by the philosophers involved. Also, the distinction was not as clear-cut as in sometimes suggested; for example, Descartes and Locke have similar views about the nature of human ideas. The three main rationalists were all committed to the importance of empirical science, and in many respects the empiricists were closer to Descartes in their methods and metaphysical theories than were Spinoza and Leibniz. History of Rationalism René Descartes -) Descartes thought that only knowledge and eternal truths – including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences – could be attained by reason alone; other knowledge, the knowledge of physics, required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method. He also argued that although dreams appear as real as sense experience, these dreams cannot provide persons with knowledge. Also, since conscious sense experience can be the cause of illusions, then sense experience can be doubtable. As a result, Descartes, deduced that a rational pursuit of truth should doubt every belief about reality. He elaborated these beliefs in such works as Disclosure on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy. Descartes developed a method to attain truths according to which nothing that cannot be recognized by the intellect (or reason) can be classified as knowledge. These truths are gained “without any sensory experience”, according to Descartes. Truths that are attained by reason are broken down into elements that intuition can grasp, which, through a purely deductive process, will result in clear truths about reality. Descartes therefore argued, as a result of his method, that reason alone determined knowledge, and that this could be done independently of the senses. For instance, his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, is a conclusion reached a priori i.e. not through an inference from experience. This was, for Descartes an irrefutable principle upon which to ground all form of other knowledge. Descartes posited a metaphysical dualism, distinguishing between the substances of human body (“res extensa”) and the mind or soul (“res cogitans”). This crucial distinction would be left unresolved and lead to what is known as the mind-body problem, since the two substances in the Cartesian system are independent of each other and irreducible. Baruch Spinoza -) The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is a systematic, logical, rational philosophy developed in seventeenth-century Europe. Spinoza’s philosophy is a system of ideas constructed upon basic building blocks with an internal consistency with which Spinoza tried to answer life’s major questions and in which he proposed that “God exists only philosophically”. He was heavily influenced by thinkers such as Descartes, Euclid and Thomas Hobbes, as well as theologians in the Jewish philosophical tradition such as Maimonides.(10) But his work was in many respects a departure from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many of Spinoza’s ideas continue to vex thinkers today and many of his principles, particularly regarding the emotions, have implication for modern approaches to psychology. Even top thinkers have found Spinoza’s “geometrical method” difficult to comprehend: Goethe admitted that he “could not really understood what Spinoza was on about most of the time.” His magnum opus, Ethics, contains unresolved obscurities and has a forbidding mathematical structure modeled on Euclid’s geometry. Spinoza’s philosophy attracted believers such as Albert Einstein and much intellectual attention. Gottfried Leibniz -) Leibniz was the last of the great Rationalists who contributed heavily to other fields such as mathematics. He did not develop his system, however, independently of these advances Leibniz rejected Cartesian dualism and denied the existence of a material world. In Leibniz’s view there are infinitely many simple substances, which he called “monads” (possibly taking the term from the work of Anne Conway). Leibniz developed his theory of monads in response of both Descartes and Spinoza. In rejecting this response he was forced to arrive at his own solution. Monads are the fundamental unit of reality, according to Leibniz, constituting both inanimate and animate things. These units of reality represent the universe, though they are not subject to the laws of causality or space established harmony to account for apparent causality in the world. Immanuel Kant -) Immanuel Kant started as a traditional rationalist, having studied the rationalists Leibniz and Wolff, but after studying David Hume’s works, which “woke [him] from [his] dogmatic slumbers”, he developed a distinctive and very influential rationalism of his own, which attempted to synthesize the traditional rationalist and empiricist traditions. Kant named his branch of epistemology Transcendental Idealism, and he first laid out these views in his famous work The Critique of Pure Reason. In it he argued that there were fundamental problems with both rationalist and empiricist dogma. To the rationalists he argued, broadly, that pure reason is flawed when it goes beyond its limits and claims to know those things that are necessarily beyond the realm of all possible experience: the existence of God, free will, and the immortality of the human soul. Kant referred to these objects as “The Thing in Itself” and goes on to argue that their status as objects beyond all possible experience by definition means we cannot know them. To the empiricist he argued that while it is correct that experience is fundamentally necessary for human knowledge, reason is necessary for processing the experience into coherent thought. He therefore concludes that both reason and experience are necessary for human knowledge. PRAGMATISM Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes ad process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentation, radical empiricism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, and fallibilism. There is general consensus among pragmatists that philosophy should take the methods and insights of modern science into account. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) deserves most of the credit for pragmatism, along with later twentieth century contributors William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Another brand of pragmatism, known sometimes as neo-pragmatism, gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late 20th-Century pragmatists. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a “neoclassical” pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Pierce, James, and Dewey. The word pragmatism derives from Greek πράγμα, (pragma) “deed, act”, which comes from πρήσσω (prassō) “to pass over, to practice, to achieve”. Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United Sates in the 1870s. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright, as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. The first use in print of name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce’s 1877-8 “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” series (including “The Fixation of Belief”, 1877 and especially “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, 1878) as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain’s definition of belief, which was “that upon which a man is prepared to act.” Peirce wrote that “from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary: so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism.” John Shook has said, “Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, fro as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation.” Inspiration for the various pragmatists included:        Francis Bacon who coined the saying ipsa scientia potestas est (“knowledge itself is power”) David Hume for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action Thomas Reid, for his direct realism Immanuel Kant, for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name “pragmatism” G. W. F. Hegel who introduced temporality into philosophy (Pinkard in Misak 2007) J. S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism George Berkeley for his project to eliminate all unclear concepts from philosophy (Peirce 8:33) Primacy of practice Pragmatism is based on the premise that the human capability to theorize is necessary for intelligent practice. Theory and practice are not separate spheres; rather theories and distinctions are tools or maps for finding our way in the world. As John Dewey put it, there is no question of theory versus practice but rather of intelligent practice versus uniformed practice. Anti-reification of concepts and theories Dewey, in The Quest For Certainty, criticized what he called “the philosophical fallacy”: philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don’t realize that these are merely nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This caused metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the “ultimate Being” of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a “realm of value”, the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thinking, and so on. David I. Hildebrand sums up the problem: “Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back onto experience” (Hildebrand 2003). A summary of which can conclude that pragmatism is subjugated by perception. Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy has a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. These philosophies then restored either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. Pragmatists criticized the former for it’s a priorism, and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain, psychologically and biologically, how the relation between knower and known ‘works’ in the world. In 1868, C. S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind – the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around (De Waal 2005, pp. 7-10). At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his “Illustration of the Logic of Science” series, Pierce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general. This is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate more thorough naturalism and psychologism. Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to - and sometimes thought of a superior to - the empirical sciences. W. V. Quine, instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay Epistemology Naturalized (Quine 1969), also criticized ‘traditional’ epistemology and its “Cartesian dream” of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry. Reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilis Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a ‘God-eye-view’, this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes’ famous and influential methodology in a Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat so as to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant manner of fact (which Dewy called a ‘situation’), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationality self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is actually congenial to the older skeptical tradition. Pragmatist theory of truth and epistemology Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what’s useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms use to coper with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an “ecological” account of knowledge: inquiry is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with. Many of James’ best-turned phrases---truth’s cash value (James 1907, P. 200) and the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking (James 1907, P. 222)--- were taken out of context and caricatured in contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with practical utility is true. William James wrote: It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the truth is that which ‘works’. Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives ‘satisfaction’! He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant. (James 1907, p. 90) In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle. The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing, (James they prove in inquiry and in action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In Pragmatism nothing practical or useful is held to be necessarily true, nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn’t accord with the facts (and is therefore not true). Pragmatism in other fields of philosophy While pragmatism started out simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views. Logic Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in the textbook “Formal Logic.” By then, Schiller’s pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy. Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in an actual context. The least famous of Schiller’s main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book “Formal Logic.” In this sequel, “Logic for Use,” Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in “Formal Logic”. What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method. Whereas F. C. S. Schiller actually dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others - or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. K. Lewis C. S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic. Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is actually an epistemological work). Metaphysics James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straight forward fashion: experience is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality. Radical empiricism, or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey’s words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms. William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming: A young graduate began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangle, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which you philosophy - professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it […] In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it […] It is no explanation of our concrete universe (James 1907, pp. 8-9). F. C. S. Schiller’s first book, “Riddles for the Sphinx”, was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatists movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. The result of the split between these two explanatory schemes that are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism, Schiller contends, is that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the “higher” aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add (iod), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the “lower” aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it actually dos help in explanation. In the second half of the twentieth century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what ‘ultimate reality’ consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the post analytical philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to adopt the intentional stance and acknowledge both the ‘syntactical’ aspects of reality (i.e. whizzing atoms) and its emergent or ‘semantic’ properties (i.e. meaning and value). Radical Empiricism gives interesting answers to questions about the limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed - most pragmatists would disagree - that science degrades everything that is meaningful into ‘merely’ physical phenomena. Philosophy of mind Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1929) and half a century later Richard Rorty in his monumental Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to be body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no needs of posit the mind or mind stuff as an ontological category. Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or naturist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former (Rorty among them) want to do away with the problem because they believe it’s a psudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that is a meaningful empirical question. Ethics Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Both facts and values have cognitive content: knowledge is what we should believe, values are hypothesis about what is good in action. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the Good Reasons approach. The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle. William James’ contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay. The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a pleas for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for suitable proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. […] A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact if a pure consequence of the percursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exit on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. (James 1896). Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. (Edel 1993) In his classic article Three Independent Factors in Morals (Dewey 1930), he tried to integrate three philosophical perspective on morality; the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved. (Anderson, SEP) Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself. (Dewey 2004 [1910] ch. 7: Dewey 1997 [ 1938], p. 47). Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophers of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feeling or imperatives, but as hypothesis about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience. A further implication of this view is the ethics is fallible undertaking, since human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them. A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan’s “Making Mortality” (Lekan 2003). Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent. Aesthetics John Dewey’s Art as Experience, based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience. (Field, IEP) Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone’s creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey’s treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as “a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity”, a human “utterance” that isn’t an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works or art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given. Philosophy of religion Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in A Common Faith and the latter in The Varieties of Religious Experience. It should be noted, from a general point of view, that for William James something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) will not actually help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are actually hear. As such, pragmatism isn’t antithetical to religion but it isn’t an apologetic for faith either. Joseph Margolis, in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995), makes a distinction between “existence” and “reality”. He suggests using the term “exists” only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce’s Secondness: things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be “real”, though they do not “exist”. Margolis suggests that God, in such is linguistic usage, might very well be “real”, causing believers to act in such a way, but might not “exist”. Analytical, neoclassical and neo-pragmatism Neo-pragmatism is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers, some of them radically opposed to one another. The name neo-pragmatist signifies that the thinkers in question incorporate important insights of, and yet significantly diverge from the classical pragmatists. This divergence may occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them) are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in actual conceptual formation (C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey, Richard Rorty dislikes Peirce). Important analytical new-pragmatists include the aforementioned Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davison, Hilary Putnam and the early Richard Rorty. Brazilian social thinker Roberto Unger advocates for a “radical pragmatism”, one that denaturalizes’ society and culture, and thus insists that we can “transform the character of our relation to social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just to change, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that comprise them.”[20] Stanley Fish, the later Rotry and Jürgen Habermas are closer to continental thought. Neoclassical pragmatism denotes those thinkers who consider themselves inheritors of the project and the classical pragmatists. Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (kno0wn for the theory of foundherentism) are well-known examples. Many pragmatist ideas (especially those of Peirce) find a natural expression in the decision-theoretic reconstruction of epistemology pursued in the work of Isaac Levi. Nicholas Rescher advocates his version of “methodical pragmatism” based on constructing pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its evidentiation. Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. It is possible considering the advent of post-analytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, the more philosophers will be influenced by pragmatist thought without necessarily publicly committing themselves to that philosophical school. Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine’s, falls into this category, as does Stephen Toulmin, who arrived at his philosophical position via Wittgenstein, whom he calls “a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind” (foreword for Dewey 1929 in the 1988 edition, p. xiii). Another example is Mark Johnson whose embodied philosophy (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) shares its psychologism, direct realism and anti-cartesianism with pragmatism. Conceptual pragmatism is theory of knowledge originating with the work of the philosopher and logician Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the 1929 book Mind and the World Order. Outline of a Theory of Knowledge. ‘French Pragmatism is attended with theorists like Bruno Latour, Michel Crozier and Luc Boltnaski and Laurent Thevenot. It is often seen as opposed to structural problems connected to the French Critical Theory of Pierce Bourdieu. Legacy and contemporary relevance In the twentieth century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics. However, logical positivism doesn’t stress action like pragmatism does. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection. Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism rather than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character and because it takes the broader functioning of language in an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations between language and world. Pragmatism has ties to process philosophy. Much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, who aren’t usually considered pragmatists because they differ so much on other points. (Douglas Browning et al. 1998, Rescher, SEP). Behaviorism and functionalism in psychology and sociology also have ties to pragmatism, which is not surprising considering that James and Dewey were both scholars of psychology and that Mead became a sociologist. Utilitarianism has some significant parallels to Pragmatism and John Stuart Mill exposed similar values. Influence of pragmatism in social sciences Symbolic interactionism, a major perspective, within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism in the early 20th century, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, as well as that Pierce and William James. Increasing attention is being given to pragmatist epistemology in other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with divisive debates over the status of social scientific knowledge. Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach which is both pluralist and practical. Influence of pragmatism in public administration The classical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of Public Administration. Scholars claim classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of Public Administration. At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for making programs “work” in a pluralistic, problem-oriented environment. Public administrators are also responsible of the day-to-day work with citizens. Dewey’s participatory democracy can be applied in this environment. Dewey and James’ notion of theory as a tool, helps administrators craft theories to resolve policy and administrative problems. Further, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists. Which pragmatism (classical pragmatism or neo-pragmatism) makes the most sense in public administration has been the source of debate. The debate began when Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey’s notion of the Community of Inquiry. Hugh Miller objected to one element of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy