We must not worry how few we are and fall from each other More than language can express Hope for the artist in America & etc —Susan Howe, " Articulation of Sound Forms in Time " Meliorism, or philosophical hopefulness, has long been acknowledged to be a genuine infl uence on pragmatist philosophy. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in this idea as an increasing number of books ...

In 1907, Charles Peirce attempted to write an article that would introduce his distinct variety of pragmatism a general audience. He intended it initially for The Nation and later Atlantic Monthly, eventually producing more than five hundred handwritten sheets, but both ultimately declined print any it. Multiple preliminary drafts comprise the manuscripts Richard Robin catalogued as R 319-322 3...

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...

Qualitative research is often associated with interpretivism, but alternatives do exist. Besides critical research and sometimes positivism, qualitative research in information systems can be performed following a paradigm of pragmatism. This paradigm is associated with action, intervention and constructive knowledge. This paper has picked out interpretivism and pragmatism as two possible and i...

Purpose – To show that the neo-pragmatist position of Richard Rorty, when combined with a sociocultural perspective, provides library and information science (LIS) with a forceful epistemological tool. Design/methodology/approach – Literature-based conceptual analysis of: historical development of pragmatism in relation to other epistemological positions; neo-pragmatism as a non-dualist, both p...

This paper represents the first installment of a larger project devoted to the relevance of pragmatism for bioethics. One self-consciously pragmatist move would be to return to the classical pragmatist canon of Peirce, James and Dewey in search of substantive doctrines or methodological approaches that might be applied to current bioethical controversies. Another pragmatist (or neopragmatist) m...

Introduction I am never entirely sure what those who call themselves pragmatists or who declare an affi nity with pragmatism actually believe in. Pragmatists would probably respond that this is the wrong question, as what matters is not what they believe in but what they do with their beliefs—or, to be more precise, what follows from their beliefs. Aft er all, one of the founding insights of pr...

Statistics has moved beyond the frequentist-Bayesian controversies of the past. Where does this leave our ability to interpret results? I suggest that a philosophy compatible with statistical practice, labelled here statistical pragmatism, serves as a foundation for inference. Statistical pragmatism is inclusive and emphasizes the assumptions that connect statistical models with observed data. ...

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]. " ...