What is wrong with pragmatism as a philosophy, or way of choosing philosophy? Why isn’t it popular?
I can’t buy into “What is good/convenient/pleasing/useful” is true.
What is useful is useful.
What is true is true.
What is useful is true is not a tautology.
Thanks, but what pragmatism says is that you already do, doesn’t it?
Your question isn’t very focused… what do you mean “what’s wrong with pragmatism?” Can you offer examples or situations where choosing with a pragmatic philosophical approach might be frowned upon?
Well, actually I was asking for them, not producing them myself. That was the point. I was just wondering why pragmatism isn’t as popular as it seems it should be.
I think pragmatism is terrific.
No offense meant to anyone, but no one can meaningfully assert that “what is useful is true”. I guess you can assert that “if it is useful to believe that something is true, then it is true”, and clearly that isn’t true. But pragmatism is simply the idea that “you should do what yields the best results”, which seems trivially true.
I’ve never heard a coherent argument against pragmatism. I have no idea why it isn’t more popular. Although, I’ve also never heard a coherent argument against utilitarianism - but I can understand why people get confused into rejecting it, whereas I can’t understand how anyone could reject pragmatism.
Pragmatism has many forms, but is popular, I think…
But where are the sticklers? You guys are supposed to be arguing, not agreeing!
I’ve heard so many arguments against utilitarianism, both within utilitarianism (Is act or rule utilitarianism better?) and outside of utilitarianism (Kantianism has better results in certain situations than utilitarianism does.).
Pragmatism is so hard to reject because it isn’t really an epistemology. It essentially argues that epistemology is a stupid subject to ponder because the only biases we demonstrably have are propensities for utility and proof. Scientific instrumentalism and later pragmatists are showing that throughout history, theories are eventually proven wrong and replaced with those that encompass larger scopes of our perceivable world and enable us to use that added knowledge to our advantage. Our only job, it seems, is to expand the normal science until we have to shift the paradigm. That’s what most philosophers do when they “take a different perspective on something.” Scientists have many more constraints in doing this than philosophers do.
Oh yeah, against pragmatism. I don’t know any good ones, really. In The Meaning of Truth, William James gives an account of how Pratt had to misrepresent pragmatist thinking in order to fight against it. Most counterarguments I’ve heard are essentially rebuttals to staw man arguments, failing to interpret pragmatic thought somewhere or another.
Falsificationists could argue that pragmatism is non-falsifiable somewhere in its theory, but I don’t know where.
But really, what do you have epistemologically that is either not contained within pragmatism or has a means of fighting against it? Objectivists might argue harshly against it, but empiricism inspired it, and Rorty is showing how existentialism and postmodernism are increasingly reliant on a pragmatic framework. I think it wins out well enough.