William James’s Pragmatism

Jerome Bruner and William James Regarding Pragmatism ’ s Does Pragmatism

As its most basic mission, pragmatism sets out to determine an idea’s merit by examining its practical consequences, rather than through purely abstract evaluation. As a result of this emphasis on an idea’s effectiveness, the complex ways in which pragmatists conceive of abstract notions such as truth and self-concept are often overlooked. Close examination of the works of two pragmatist thinke...

William James’s psychological pragmatism: habit, belief and purposive human behaviour

Modern institutional economists look to pragmatism for: (1) an evolutionary philosophy of knowledge; and (2) a foundation of a theory of human nature. These two elements are combined in William James, who was both a philosopher of pragmatism and a pioneering experimental psychologist. The author shows first how William James added psychological depth to the pragmatic tradition as it was left by...

Pragmatism, Ideology and Embodiment: William James and the Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics

Volitional Pragmatism

I seek here to develop the general outlines of a theory of environmental policy. It is a theory that will stand in stark contrast to the tendentious and normative welfare economics that now dominates the policy dialogue in applied economics. In this standard approach, economists place " …exclusive reliance on individual utilities to judge social goodness and right actions [Sen 1993, p. 521]. " ...

Five Answers on Pragmatism

Prof. Haack answers a series of questions on pragmatism, beginning with the origins of this tradition in the work of Peirce and James, its evolution in the work of Dewey and Mead, and its influence beyond the United States in, for example, the Italian pragmatists and the radical British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller. Classical pragmatism, she observes, is a rich and varied tradition from which t...