ABSTRACT
Pragmatism is widely regarded as America’s leading contribution to Western philosophy. Far from being a unified theory, pragmatism stood for a number of loosely connected theories of meaning, knowledge, and conduct formulated by its proponents. Some generalities can be made, however. Pragmatists held that the meaning/truth of ideas and concepts was not absolute but was determined by how they were used in practice, by the functions they served, and by the results they achieved. This differed from the tradition of Cartesian rationalism, for example, which held that certain truths are eternal and are known to be selfevident through reason alone. Pragmatists, instead, extended the empirical methods of scientific inquiry to philosophy, arguing that humans ascribed truth and meaning to concepts and beliefs by testing them out in practice and noting their results. Leading American pragmatists were William James (1842-1910), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), John Dewey (1859-1952), George Herbert Mead (1862-1931), and Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964). While pragmatism was an American-based philosophy, it was influential in Europe as well; among the most notable to ally themselves with the movement were philosophers such as F.C.S.Schiller (1864-1937) in England and a school of young philosophers in Italy headed by Giovanni Papini (1881-1956).
