What's the Use of Pragmatism?

Pragmatism is the view that we should abandon the question of what is true in favor of the question of what is useful.

Said differently, a theory is true—for pragmatists—if it helps us accomplish something, not if it accords with reality. Physics doesn’t describe reality, say pragmatists. Rather, it helps us put people on the moon, make atom bombs, and build self-driving cars.

The philosopher Paul Feyerabend goes further: there’s nothing inherently better about using a compass with cardinal directions to navigate. One could just as easily bird-song and dispense with the concepts of North and South.

But if pragmatism makes utility the metric on which we judge ideas, we must ask, what’s the utility of pragmatism?

And what would happen if we judged pragmatic philosophy to be unhelpful or even harmful? It would be a self-contradiction, like the “liar’s paradox” (“I am a liar.”)

How can pragmatism be harmful?

• One possible answer is that it is relativistic. There really are truths independent of our use for them—and ignoring them comes at our peril.

• Another is that pragmatism gives us no way to decide between competing objectives and viewpoints. Since we can’t agree on what is useful, pragmatism ends up simply describing ideas as a power struggle between different self-interests. Pragmatism ends up becoming a form of cynicism.

• Another is that pragmatism leads to egotism. If I decide what is true on the basis of what is useful to me, I end up missing out on those things whose value can’t be justified by utilitarian thinking. Which is another way of saying that pragmatism is deeply unromantic.

Of course, pragmatists will counter that relativism, cynicism, and a lack of romanticism are unfair ways to frame what is instead simply a sober way of looking at how things are. But here, pragmatism runs into self-contradiction. Having dispensed with the notion of how things really are, it can no longer claim to be an authority on the nature of things. Pragmatism is true only if is useful. Thus, the onus is on the pragmatist to argue for the utility of cynicism, relativism, and anti-romanticism.

In light of these reflections, in what contexts are you compelled by pragmatism and in what contexts are you repelled? Is pragmatism, despite its own claims to the contrary, a metaphysical position after all?