While John Dewey is considered one of the classical pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is not a word he often used to describe his way of thinking. Rather, the term was popularized in the early 1900s by Harvard philosopher William James, who credited the term to an old friend of his named Charles Sanders Peirce. For a number of reasons, Peirce never attained the academic successes of Dewey and James, and he gradually developed a complex philosophical system that is beyond the scope of both my expertise and this article. However, in a series of articles published in popular magazines in the late 1800s, Peirce set forth in rather clear terms a number of the principles that James and Dewey later adopted and developed.
Peirce was deeply interested in what he called the fixation of belief. Belief by Peirce’s definition is the opposite of doubt – when we have a belief, we know how we should respond to a given situation, but when we are in doubt, we are momentarily unable to act. The doubt acts as an irritant, provoking us to do something to establish a belief and therefore regain our ability to act. Let’s take a somewhat trivial example to illustrate the point. If I want to go somewhere, I might have to decide whether to take the bus or walk. If I already have some established belief about which method of travel is better, I’ll choose that method without much of a thought, and go about my business. But let’s say I can’t decide. I am in doubt over the preferred method of travel, and so I neither walk nor take the bus. Instead I need to take some kind of action to resolve the doubt. I might check my pocket and realize I don’t have exact fare, at which point I believe that walking is the best course of action. Doubt resolved, course of action chosen, I can proceed.
According to Peirce, the human being doesn’t really care how the doubt gets resolved. It just wants the doubt gone. However, human history has revealed that some methods are ultimately more effective than others. Peirce defines ‘more effective’ according to the original goal of eliminating doubt – if a method generates a belief that generates a new doubt almost immediately, it’s not a very good method. Peirce identified four commonly used methods, and he wasn’t shy about pointing out his favorite.
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