A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Pragmatism and Technology

Pragmatism has been the distinctive American contribution to philosophy. In contrast to previous philosophies that evaluated claims in terms of principles or axioms that logically justify them or in terms of perceptual data on which they are based, pragmatism evaluates claims in terms of consequences for action. Charles S. Peirce initially presented pragmatism as a principle for the evaluation of meaning and had a different characterization of truth. When William James used the pragmatic principle as a definition of truth, and understood truth as results in the broadest possible sense, Peirce dissociated himself from James’s account by calling his own approach “pragmaticism.” John Dewey developed an account of evaluation of claims in some ways closer to Peirce’s but did use the pragmatic maxim as a means of evaluating truth as well as meaning. Dewey at one point suggested that, since the term “truth” is so closely associated with the classical notion of correspondence with pre-existing, independent facts, one should give up the term “truth” for “warranted assertability.”

During the middle third of the twentieth century in the USA the émigré Central European logical empiricists became allied with the pragmatists on many issues. Pragmatist criticisms of logical empiricism, such as those of W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars borrowed theses from pragmatism to criticize the logical positivist criterion of meaning in terms of verification by sense observations, ...