Pragmatism

An American school of philosophy that emerged from the informal Metaphysical Club discussions in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1870s, holding that the meaning of a concept and the truth of a belief are to be judged by their practical consequences in experience rather than by a fixed correspondence to some antecedent reality. Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term and gave the position its first rigorous statement; William James's Pragmatism (1907) brought it to a wide public audience with a more psychological, individually oriented account of truth as what works for a believer, close enough to Peirce's own view that Peirce relabeled his position pragmaticism to keep the two apart. Later pragmatists extended the method into education, ethics and democratic theory across the first half of the twentieth century, and pragmatism's core idea, that inquiry is a practical, self-correcting process rather than a search for fixed foundations, remains influential in American philosophy of science and epistemology.