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INTRODUCTION
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that originated with Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914)
(who first stated the pragmatic maxim) and came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of
William James and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider
practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of philosophy. These thinkers found the value of
philosophy to be its application in diverse disciplinary fields, and refused to separate the components of
philosophy from practical concerns. Peirce conceived of pragmatism, not as a doctrine, but as a methodology to
clarify the meaning of concepts, and contributed primarily to semantics. James developed pragmatism
particularly as a theory of truth, and Dewey further developed pragmatism as a theory of inquiry.
Upon the rise of analytic philosophy after World War II, the classical pragmatism represented by these
philosophers became unpopular. Richard Rorty revitalized the pragmatist movement and developed it as
“neopragmatism.” With epistemology as its core, pragmatism contributed in diverse fields of study including
psychology, pedagogy, and social theory, as well as metaphysics and ethics. The idea of the primacy of
"practice" became a guiding thread for American culture.

MEANING OF PRAGMATIC MOVEMENT

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes
to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other
approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology (Mey, 1993). An
American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines
that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to
guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. According to
Henry, & Robert, (1991), the word pragmatics derives from Latin word, “pragmaticus” from the Greek
(pragmatikos), meaning amongst others “fit for action”, which comes from (pragma), “deed, act”, and that
from (prassō), “to pass ove”r, to practise, to achieve.

IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATIC MOVEMENT

James quoted with approval a statement of A.E. Taylor that "anything is real of which we find
ourselves obliged to take account in any way. But since we are forced to proceed and ask questions about the
things of our experience. In terms of our experience as well as reason James concludes for a pluralistic view of
the universe as opposed to a monism of mind or a monism of matter.
Pluralism is the idea that there is no single connecting entity or substance that runs through the entire
universe. In many ways the universe is chaotic. There is connection between some things, but experience is
limited and contradictory when it comes to concluding that the world is all minds or all matter. The question of
the nature of things can be decided on empirical grounds alone and so far one can conclude that "the world is
one just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite
connexion fails to obtain." There is little possibility of seeing a connection between a bank account, quasars, the
King of England, and the book that is being read. Pluralism means that one must take a census of the different
forms of reality. There are practical results of the differing views about reality. "The essential contrast is that for
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rationalism reality is ready made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making,
and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side, the universe is absolutely secure, on the
other it is still pursuing its adventures." On James' view the world is "unfinished, growing in all sorts of places"
especially in those areas where human beings are at work. The other option, materialism, is ruled out because
there is the need of mind as an important ingredient in life. We can see more of this in the second heading on
the subject of man.
Another practical implication of James' view of reality is seen in the differing views concerning how we
got here. At best we can say only that the universe is, said James, and we cannot with certainty say how it got
here. This question is one of the darkest of all philosophy. "All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak
disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs." As long as we look to the past there is no difference between
spiritualism and materialism. We are here, life is here, and how it got here is difficult to answer. Accept either
option and there is no difference in end results to the moment. But focusing on the future brings immediate
significant differences. Given the simple facts of the world as the empiricists or scientists, or naturalists see
them and you have a bleak picture of the universe running down, our sun becoming cold, and man and life
disappearing. But in the pragmatic hypothesis of James, there is hope. God has the last word, and it is not a
frozen universe but a warm abode of life eternal with Him.
It is to be noted at this point, to avoid confusion, that James sides with the rationalists in accepting God
and mind, but rejects their monism of the Spirit. He accepts some of the empiricists stress on science but
believes in pluralism, rather than a monism of matter, and unlike the naturalist, believes in God. James believed
that materialism denied the moral order in the universe as being eternal and giving up ultimate hope. The
idealists affirmed an eternal moral order, but because of its monism of the Spirit it let loose of hope.
James rejected the idealist’s monism for several reasons: (l) He believed that monism could not account
for finite consciousness. If nothing existed but the Absolute Mind, there is no meaning of finite mind. Finite
mind is swallowed up in the Absolute. (2) Monism has a serious problem with evil if only the Absolute exists.
Evil cannot be taken seriously in a monistic world. For pluralism, the only problem is how to get rid of it and
this was an accepted possibility. (3) Our perception sees the world as changing, and this change must be
regarded as an illusion or mirage. Monism thus contradicts our senses. (4) Monism is fatalistic because
everything is conceived to be necessary. This makes our sense of freedom illusory.
Monism appears to be hopeful, but its logical position leads to pessimism. James accepted meliorism
rather than optimism or pessimism. Meliorism is the idea that the world is capable of being improved.
Meliorism relates to novelty in the world. Meliorism is related to free-will of the human. If the world is
necessary in its present form, there can be no change and no free-will to achieve change. If there is genuine
free-will, there can be real progress and change to a better world. If we are inclined to reject these possibilities
we must do so in contradiction to our sense.

CONCLUSION
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition
is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of
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accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism originated in the United States during the
latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it has significantly influenced non-philosophers-notably in the
fields of law, education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism.

The term “pragmatism” was first used in print to designate a philosophical outlook about a century ago
when William James (1842-1910) pressed the word into service during an 1898 address entitled “Philosophical
Conceptions and Practical Results,” delivered at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously
swore, however, that the term had been coined almost three decades earlier by his compatriot and friend C. S.
Peirce (1839-1914). (Peirce, eager to distinguish his doctrines from the views promulgated by James, later
relabeled his own position “pragmaticism”—a name, he said, “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”) The
third major figure in the classical pragmatist pantheon is John Dewey (1859-1952), whose wide-ranging
writings had considerable impact on American intellectual life for a half-century. After Dewey, however,
pragmatism lost much of its momentum.

REFERENCES
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Language Pragmatic Competence, The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp.
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Henry, George L. & Robert, Scott A. (1991). Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus.

James, William (1912). Essays in Radical Empiricism, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912, pp. 46-47.

Masahiro Takimoto (2008). The Effects of Deductive and Inductive Instruction on the Development of
Language Learners' Pragmatic Competence, The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Fall,
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Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).

James rejected certain views of his time associated with Herbert Spencer which regarded man as the product of
environment, circumstances, physical geography and ancestral conditions. In contrast, James argued the
differences of man are due "to the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their
initiative and their decisions."13 Similarly, James rejected any version of evolutionary history which
ignored the "vital importance of individual initiative" and which reduced man to a product of the most
"ancient oriental fatalism."14

The power of conceptual thought is one of the distinguishing marks of man over the brutes.15 Man transcends
the merely perceptual world about him. "The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his
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substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes."16
Man's mind is not just a blank sheet of paper as the empiricists were inclined to hold. The very nature
of mind is such that it cannot be "a reactionless sheet at all."17 In the same line of thinking James
denies that consciousness is a "thing," but instead speaks of it as a "function."18 Man is conscious, but
not a conscious.

James described mind as part of man's total makeup in a positive and negative fashion. Negatively, man is more
than psychological reflexes. In an essay on reflex action and theism, James said that reflect psychology
does not disprove rationality or God. The mind is "an essentially teleological mechanism. I mean by
this that the conceiving or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions exclusively for
the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our sense, but
are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether."19 In another context James argued that
the brain does more than merely produce thought as the materialists contended. The materialists argued
that when the brain dies, the total "person" is dead. James rejected this and argued that the brain has
other functions which he called releasing or permissive function and transmissive functions. But even if
one granted the materialist contention that the brain produces consciousness, this is still the "absolute
world-enigma."20

Positively, James argued from the analogy of his own consciousness to the mind of another body. The existence
of another mind is postulated "because I see your body acting in a certain way, its gestures, facial
movements, words and conduct generally are 'expressive,' so I deem it actuated as my own is, by an
inner life like mine."21

Man's belief about himself is important. He alluded to Chesterton who said that it is more important to know
what a person believes about himself than knowing his financial condition.

There are two kinds of people, as James described them. First, the tender-minded are rationalistic,
intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic and dogmatical. The tough-
minded are empiricists, sensationaistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and
sceptical."22 In James, pragmatism gives the best of both views.

Two examples may help to make James' position clear. The tender-minded position accepted the fact of God's
existence, but the tough-minded argued that God is not seen with the eyes. The pragmatism of James is
not limited to the matter of sensation-perception. James argued for radical empiricism which he defined
as follows:
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its construction any element that is not directly
experienced nor exclude from them any element that is directly e experienced.23

Empiricism is restricted to one or more sense perceptions. Radical empiricism defines experience as something
that may transcend mere sense perception. Hence a man can experience God that he cannot see.

Another example is free-will. Man's freedom has been questioned by a variety of people but especially the
materialists of his day. James quoted Huxley who said, "Let me be wound up every day like a watch, to
go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom."24 But this, for James, is not really freedom. Without the
implication of becoming worse by choice, freedom means nothing in Huxley's use. A pragmatic view of
free-will means "novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest element as well as in its
surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past."25 Free-will means along
with novelty the possibility of making the world a better place. Freedom is a theory of promise, like
belief in God, and the theory of hope makes a practical difference in man's outlook about himself and
the world about himself.

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