ABSTRACT
"Pragmatism" often means different things to different people; and even when it does not, there are still different kinds of pragmatists. Typically, pragmatists believe that the rational acceptability of a belief, either as an item of knowledge or as an item of justified belief. Invariably, pragmatists have also been fallibilists and verificationists with regard to beliefs about physical objects and the laws governing them in the external world. In recent philosophy of science, there are at least three distinct pragmatic responses to the problem of induction. They are: Charles Peirce's; methodological pragmatism; and simply a non-methodological form of pragmatism. Peirce's doubt-belief theory of inquiry, then, construes the activity of fixing or establishing belief as a biological activity under the principle of homeostasis. This chapter turns to the question or the problem of scientific explanation, there does seem to be a distinctive pragmatic proposal countering all variations on the DN Model.
