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Article: Pragmatism
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
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Pragmatism
Is pragmatism the optimistic expression of the industrial era, deemed to be vanishing in the postindustrial society, or is it a serious philosophical alternative to traditional rationalism and empiricism, idealism and realism? What is labeled
pragmatism
ranges from the philosophy of nineteenth-century American scholar Charles Sanders Peirce (1839
–
1914), who claimed inquiry for truth's sake, to Richard Rorty's (b. 1931) twentieth-century neo-pragmatism, which claims, in an antirealist spirit, that criteria of evidence are not objective but only conversational constraints. Most pragmatists, however, try to find a middle way between metaphysical realism and ...