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The History and Ideas of Pragmatism

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DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602065 · Source: OAI

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Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 892–909 r 2006 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/06 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/jors

The history and ideas of pragmatism

R Ormerod*
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

This paper examines the origins of philosophical pragmatism in the USA in the second half of the 19th-century and its
development and use up to the Second World War. The story is told through the lives and ideas of some of the main
originators, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Charles Saunders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. The core idea of
pragmatism, that beliefs are guides to actions and should be judged against the outcomes rather than abstract principles,
dominated American thinking during the period of economic and political growth from which the USA emerged as a
world power. The paper suggests that the practical, commonsense, scientific approach embedded in pragmatism
resonates with OR as practised and that much of pragmatism could be attractive to practitioners and academics alike.
Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 892–909. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602065
Published online 14 September 2005

Keywords: philosophy of OR; history of ideas; pragmatism

Introduction
Researchers engaged in understanding and developing the
process of operation research (OR) in the UK have looked to
philosophy for guidance and inspiration. Inter alia Boot-
hroyd drew on Popper’s critical rationalism to develop his
articulate intervention approach (Boothroyd, 1978); Check-
land (1981) discovered in Husserl’s phenomenology under-
pinning for his soft systems methodology; Jackson (1991)
and Flood (1990) have led teams drawing on the critical
theory of Habermas and the postmodernism of Foucault;
Taket and White (1993) have espoused a postmodernist and
poststructuralist approach drawing on Lyotard and other
postmodern, literary, and feminist philosophers. Such
activity is, of course, not restricted to the UK. One example
is the work of Churchman (1970), which draws on the
German idealist philosophers and pragmatism. Another is
Ulrich’s (1983) critical heuristics of social planning.
This paper falls into the genre that can be characterized as
‘mining’ philosophy for the purpose of informing OR. In
some sense all of the above fall into this category, but my
exemplar is the work of Mingers. His early papers on critical
theory (Mingers, 1980) and more recently his paper on
critical realism (Mingers, 2000) supply clear expositions of
philosophical positions. This paper is similar in purpose: it
sets out some of the ideas contained in pragmatism to inform
those interested in the philosophy of OR and points to those
areas that might be of interest to researchers and practi-
tioners alike. I have, however, taken a more historical and
contextual approach, which I hope makes the rather diverse
and sometimes contradictory subject matter easier to under-
*Correspondence: R Ormerod, 26 Coulsdon Road, Sidmouth, Devon
EX10 9JP, UK.
E-mail: richard@rormerod.freeserve.co.uk
stand than would otherwise be the case. It also serves the
purpose of showing how American pragmatism develops out
of European philosophy and feeds back into it; to that extent
it sets pragmatism in the context of the development of
Western thought. The originators of pragmatism themselves
argued that due regard should be paid to the history and
social context (experiential conditions) of ideas.
Pragmatism is a philosophical doctrine that can be traced
back to the academic sceptics of classical antiquity who
denied the possibility of achieving authentic knowledge
regarding the real truth and taught that we must make do
with plausible information adequate to the needs of practice.
The identification of ‘pragmatic belief’ by Kant (1724–1804)
was influential as was the insistence by Schopenhauer (1788–
1860) that the intellect is universally subordinate to the will.
Utilitarianism, with its tests of rightness of modes of action
in terms of their capacity to provide the greatest good of the
greatest number was yet another step in the development of
pragmatic thought. However, pragmatism as a philosophical
doctrine descends from Charles Saunders Peirce (1839–
1914). For him, pragmatism was primarily a philosophy of
meaning, with the meaning of any concept that has
application in the real world lying in the relations that link
the experiential conditions of application with observable
results. For Peirce the meaning of a proposition is
determined by the essentially positivist criterion of its
experiential consequences in strictly observational terms.
He was concerned with scientific practice and predictive
success. Peirce developed his theories in opposition to
idealism: pragmatism provided a road to objective and
impersonal standards.
Although Peirce developed pragmatism into a substantial
philosophical theory it was William James (1842–1910) who
put it on the intellectual map in 1907 with his enormously

influential book, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old
Ways of Thinking (James, 1907). James changed the con-
ception of pragmatism by giving a more personal and
subjective meaning to efficacy. For him pragmatic efficacy
did not relate to an abstracted community of scientists but to
a diversified plurality of flesh-and-blood individuals. Truth
for James is accordingly what reality compels human
individuals to believe: it is a matter of ‘what pays by way
of belief’ in the course of human activity in a given context,
and its acquisition is an invention rather than a revelation.
John Dewey (1859–1952) continued to develop pragma-
tism and its application to practical issues such as education
and politics, ensuring its influence in the USA up to the
Second World War. Dewey, like Peirce before him, saw
inquiry as a self-correcting process whose procedures and
norms must be evaluated and revised in the light of
subsequent experience. But Dewey regarded this reworking
as a social and communal process proceeding in the light of
values that are not connected specifically to science, but
rather values that are more broadly rooted in the psychic
disposition of ordinary people at large. Dewey regarded
knowledge as an instrument for action rather than an object
of disinterested belief. Peirce’s pragmatism is scientifically
élitist, James’s is psychologically personalistic, Dewey’s is
democratically populist.
Pragmatism is a word we commonly use to describe a
particular way of addressing and resolving issues, a way of
acting. The second section of this paper looks at the origins
of the word ‘pragmatism’, and its meaning. In order to
understand how the ideas of the originators developed it is
helpful to appreciate something of the social, political and
intellectual context of the USA during the formative period.
The third section of the paper therefore sketches out some of
these factors that have influenced the development of the
philosophy.
One way to understand pragmatism is through the lives,
interests and ideas of the philosophers themselves. In the
19th century intellectuals were not narrow specialists. Each
of the originators ranged widely across the various subject
areas of philosophy and into areas such as science,
psychology, education, law and politics. Between them they
were active from the end of the American Civil War to the
beginning of the Second World War, a period of about
three-quarters of a century. The result is a very diverse body
of literature with many themes, often not drawn together,
sometimes contradictory. The next four sections describe
some of the main characters (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr,
Charles S Peirce, William James and John Dewey) involved
in the original development of pragmatism and outline their
approach to selected topics. The particular topics chosen are
those that various sources suggest are the most significant
aspects of each originator’s approach. They have been
selected more because they help in gaining an understanding
of the whole range and overall approach of pragmatism
rather than because they will all necessarily be of direct
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 893
relevance to OR researchers and practitioners. This leaves it
open to the reader to find links in areas where I have not
noticed the connections.
Peirce and James are generally credited with developing
pragmatism. Frequently in philosophical writings Dewey, a
dominant figure in American philosophy up to the Second
World War, is added. I have also included Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr, who was involved at the beginning and is
considered one of the great judicial figures in US history.
Holmes’s particular interest for OR is his development and
application of his philosophical ideas while working as a
professional lawyer. I have not included Chauncey White
(who, although a considerable influence on the thinking of
the others, did not publish much) nor the lawyer Nicholas St
John Green; both were members of the Metaphysical Club
(see below). I have also not included Josiah Royce of
Harvard whose views along with those of James, White and
Peirce have been called ‘Cambridge Pragmatism’. This
tradition, which through CI Lewis, Nelson Goodman, WV
Quine, Thomas Kuhn and Hilary Putman extended to the
end of the twentieth century, is represented here by Peirce
and James. The second variant of pragmatism, ‘instrument-
alism’, is represented by Dewey. Dewey’s influence con-
tinued through the universities of Chicago, Columbia and
the several universities in New York.
The eighth section examines the impact of pragmatism,
indicating its strengths and its weaknesses. Finally pragma-
tism is discussed in relation to OR, including its use by
Churchman and Ackoff, and some pointers are given as to
how the philosophy might find application more generally
in OR.
Throughout this paper use is made of various reference
books without further citation including the Chambers
Dictionary of World History, the Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations, the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, the
Oxford Companion to English Literature and the Oxford
Companion to Philosophy. In particular, extensive use has
been made of those entries in the latter that describe the
contributions of the originators of pragmatism (CJ Hook-
way on Peirce; TLS Sprigge on James; K Hanson on
Dewey; and N Rescher on both Pragmatism and American
Philosophy). Historical accounts of philosophy in the USA
can be found in Kuklick (2003) and Menand (2001). A fuller
account of the philosophy of pragmatism can be found in
many standard philosophical texts and, of course, in the
writings of the originators of the philosophy, which are,
however, sometimes voluminous and difficult.
The word: pragmatism
As an engineer and OR practitioner the word pragmatism
has for me positive connotations. I take it to be about being
practical, getting things done, doing things a step at a time,
not allowing the best to be the enemy of the good, taking
894 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
account of others’ views, not being hung up on unattainable
principles and yielding on some issues in order to make
progress on others. For others it means failure to adhere to
theory, sloppy thinking, trimming, lack of principles. Peirce
originally took the word pragmatic from Kant’s Kritik der
reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). However, it was
James who introduced the term ‘pragmatism’ to the world in
1898 giving Peirce as the source of the philosophy. James
was well known at this time and his book Pragmatism: A
New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, published in
1907, led to 20 years of international discussion and debate.
The word pragmatism originally comes from the Latin
pragmaticus, and the Greek pragmatikos meaning deed, and
it is defined in the dictionary as follows:
Pragmatism: (1) A pragmatic attitude or procedure; (2) a
philosophy expounded notably by CS Peirce and William
James, that evaluates assertions solely by their practical
consequences and bearing on human interests.
The dictionary thus takes us straight into the philosophy
but in doing so uses the terms pragmatic and practical. These
are defined as follows:
Pragmatic: (1) dealing with matters with regard to their
practical requirements and consequences; (2) treating the
facts of history with reference to their practical questions; (3)
history of or relating to the affairs of state; (4a) concerning
pragmatism (b) meddlesome (c) dogmatic.
Practical: (1) Of or concerned with practice or use rather
than theory, (2) suited to use or action; designed mainly to
fulfill a function (3) (of a person) (a) inclined to action rather
than speculation: able to make things function well; (b)
skilled at manual tasks. (4a) That is such an effect, though
not nominally (to all practical purposes) (b) virtual (in
practical control). (5) Feasible, realistic: concerned with what
is actually possible (practical politics; practical solutions).
The word practical derives from the French practique or
Latin practicus, coming from the Greek word praktikos
meaning do, act. Practice and practise come from the same
root.
Other related words are found in philosophical discourse;
pragmatics is the branch of linguistics dealing with language
in use; pragmaticism is a term used by Jürgen Habermas
instead of pragmatism because he wanted a different word to
refer to the pragmatic aspect of communication theory
rather than the common understanding of American
pragmatism (Ulrich, 1983); pragmatize is to represent as
real or rationalize (a myth); and praxis is an accepted
practice or custom, or the practising of an art or skill.
Much of what I took as the meaning of pragmatic can be
found in the definitions above, but also there are the negative
connotations of meddlesome and dogmatic.
The scene: intellectual life in the USA after the Civil War
American pragmatism was developed in a society that had
been traumatized by the Civil War (1861–1865), a war in
which according to Winston Churchill ‘three quarters of a
million men had fallen on the field of battle. The North was
plunged in debt; the South was ruined’ (Churchill, 1958).
The war was formally about the rights of States in relation to
the Federal Government as determined by the Constitution.
The issue that brought this to a head was slavery. Many in
the North were against slavery, but before the war
abolitionists were considered very radical (most felt that
moral suasion rather than political coercion was the proper
means to induce the South to give up slavery).
American universities had developed as theological
training colleges. In 1636 Harvard was founded at Cam-
bridge, a new town in Massachusetts, as a theological college
for training priests to support the growth of the community
(MacCulloch, 2003). In the 18th century the foremost
Puritan theologian and philosopher was Jonathan Edwards
(1703–1758). He graduated from Yale in 1720 and held a
series of pastorates and ministerial posts. This left him time
to systematize and justify the Puritan theme of utter
dependence on God. He developed an idealist position: the
world exists in the mind of God and in our minds through
God’s communicating it to us.
In the 19th century the USA was a still a deeply religious
society. The South was mainly Anglican Protestant whereas
the North contained many variants of Protestantism, mainly
of the reformed variety derived from Calvin. One of the
things that held back scientific education in American
colleges was the continuing dominance of theology. Before
the emergence of more diverse universities, private philoso-
phical and literary societies provided venues for intellectual
activities. During the second half of the 19th century the
subjects covered by universities were broadened. At the same
time money from capitalist benefactors enabled new
universities to open and existing universities to expand and
modernize. Academics were required to publish and needed
to obtain PhDs. In 1876 the Johns Hopkins University was
founded, the first modern-style graduate school in the US.
During this period trustees had to establish their indepen-
dence from Government, and academics had to fight for
their intellectual freedom. This freedom was by no means
assured as benefactors wanted some influence on whom not
to employ and trustees often shared their views. Academics
had to be careful not to upset the apple cart. It was wise to
demonstrate religious commitment particularly if engaged in
research that might seem to challenge established views.
In the 19th century, as the university system grew, academic
philosophy was imported from Europe: idealists dominated at
Harvard; Scottish thought dominated at Princeton; Kantians
were prominent at Chicago; Hegelians in St Louis; and
Thomists at the Catholic institutions. Perhaps the most
influential intellectual in the USA in the middle of the century

was Frank Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). He along with
others developed New England Transcendentalism centred on
Concorde in Massachusetts. Emerson was looking for an
alternative to the combination of the religion of Unitarianism
and the empiricist philosophy of Locke. Unitarianism was a
creed founded on a belief in the innate moral goodness of the
individual (in reaction to Calvinism, which was a creed
founded on the belief in the individual’s moral depravity). It
was a religion that led its followers to oppose slavery.
Emerson, however, was not happy with the idea that such
moral, good individuals should entirely depend on the
empirical knowledge gained from their sense experiences:
surely they were not simply created as empty pots.
In 1832 Emerson had been to Europe and met Coleridge,
Wordsworth and Carlyle, through whom he had become
acquainted with German idealism in general and the
philosophical romanticism of Kant (1724–1805) in particu-
lar. On returning to the US, he developed the concept of
transcendentalism, which relies heavily on the distinction
between true reason based on intuition and the merely
analytical understanding based on logical reasoning and
sense experience. This distinction provided the foundation
for the ‘spiritual religion’ they upheld against the natural
religion of the Enlightenment and the revealed religion of
Calvinism. The adherents of New England Transcendental-
ism took progressive positions on the emancipation of
women and the abolition of slavery. Its reverence for nature
foreshadowed the ecological movement of the twentieth
century. Emerson was an important influence on Nietzsche
(1844–1900) and on both James and Dewey.
At one of the philosophical and literary societies referred
to above, The Saturday Club, Emerson met with Nathaniel
Hawthorne (the author), Louis Agassiz (a zoologist who
opposed evolutionary theories) and Benjamin Peirce (math-
ematician and astronomer; the father of Charles S Peirce)
and others. It was a dinner club that met in restaurants. No
formal presentations were expected of its members, but it
served as a medium for intellectual exchange in a world in
which disciplines, in the modern academic sense, did not
exist. In 1868 a kind of junior edition of the Saturday Club,
known as The Club, was founded in Boston. Membership
included inter alia Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, William James
and Henry James (the author and brother of William
James). There was much sparring between Holmes and
William James. In 1872 Charles Peirce formed a conversa-
tion society in Cambridge MA that included William James
and Holmes, Chauncey Wright and a few others. It was
known as the Metaphysical Club (Menand, 2001). Peirce
described his greatest insights as the product of this group.
The ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (1841–1935)
Son of a Professor of Anatomy and Physiology who had
written a popular book on Emerson, Holmes was educated
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 895
at Harvard Law School. He joined the Army to fight for the
North in the American Civil War; he believed in abolition.
During the war he was injured three times and was deeply
influenced by his experiences. He was particularly impressed
by a successful officer and friend, Henry Abbot. What
impressed him about Abbot was not so much the out-
standing coolness and bravery that he displayed in leading
his men in the face of enemy fire, but the fact that he did so
while being contemptuous of the cause for which he fought.
Holmes practised law in Boston from 1867. He made
his reputation with a fundamental book, The Common
Law, published in 1881. The book was revolutionary in its
willingness to address the accidental and pragmatic effects of
law as opposed to its invincible logic. For a time he was close
to James, but came to see him as too soft in his thinking.
James found him too hard. Holmes became Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts (1899–1902), and
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
(1902–1932). He earned his nickname, ‘the Great Dissenter’,
because he frequently dissented from his conservative
colleagues’ majority opinions, especially as the Court moved
to dismantle social legislation. Eschewing liberal activism,
however, he argued eloquently in favour of judicial restraint,
particularly relating to regulation of the economy.
Holmes on law
In Schenck v. United States (1919) Holmes said: ‘The most
stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man
falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic.’
Holmes was greatly influenced by both his father and
Emerson. The idea that disinterested inquiry is the best way
to crack the world’s nut was Holmes’s message to his
generation. He became in effect the Emerson of profession-
alism (Menand, 2001). Holmes concluded that dedicating
himself to practicing law was a suitable base in experience
from which to philosophize.
In his first law review article written in 1870 Holmes
writes; ‘It is the merit of the common law that it decides the
case first and determines the principles afterwards.’ Yet cases
get decided and opinions written and by a process that does
not seem arbitrary, or subjective by those involved. As
Menand (2001, p 338) puts it ‘ythat sentence leaves us with
the question: If principles don’t decide cases, what does?’
Holmes’s answer formed the basis of all his later jurispru-
dence. In the famous fourth sentence of the opening lecture
of The Common Law, Holmes says: ‘The life of the law has
not been logic; it has been experience.’ Jurisprudential
theories can be formalistic (stressing logical consistency),
utilitarian (emphasizing the social consequences) or histori-
cist (reflections of the circumstances in which they are
written). Holmes’s genius as a philosopher was to see the law
has no essential aspect. A case comes to court as a unique
fact situation. There are all sorts of imperatives such as
finding a just result, a result consistent with similar previous
896 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
cases, a result beneficial to society or giving the right
behavioural message. There are also desires to punish the
wicked and excuse the good, to redistribute costs from those
who cannot afford them to those who can (like manufac-
turers and insurance companies) and to obtain results to suit
the judge’s own political leanings. Each of the imperatives is
open to interpretation. What are the ‘facts’? What counts as
a relevant analogous case? What counts as a benefit of
society? Which legal principles are generally applicable?
What counts as a ‘just result’? Holmes thought that there
were no hard-and-fast distinctions in any of these areas. He
therefore concluded that overriding all of the above is the
imperative not to let it appear as though any one of these
lesser imperatives has decided the case at the blatant expense
of the others (Menand, 2001, p 339).
Perhaps the most striking of Holmes’s beliefs about the
nature of experience was his treatment of propositions, most
prominently in his dissent in the Supreme Court case of
Lochner v. New York (1905): ‘[g]eneral propositions do not
decide concrete cases.’ A second distinctive feature of his
conception of experience is that it is not individual and
internal but collective and consensual; it is social not
psychological. This is the feature responsible for his most
important contribution to American civil law, which is the
invention of the reasonable man. The reasonable man is the
fictional protagonist of modern liability theory. In The
Common Law he says ‘Experience is the test by which it is
decided whether the degree of danger attending given
conduct under certain known circumstances is sufficient
to throw the risk upon the party pursuing it.’ Whose
experience? The experience, Holmes said, of ‘an intelligent
and prudent member of the community.’ He was referring,
of course, not to judges but to members of juries (Menand,
2001, pp 344–345).
The lesson that Holmes took away from his experience in
the Civil War is that certitude leads to violence. He was
suspicious of causes. He wrote: ‘Some kind of despotism is at
the bottom of seeking for change.’ Abolitionism came to
stand in his thought for the kind of superior certitude that
drives men to kill one another. However, he felt that
everyone held strong views about the way the world should
be and everyone felt that their opponents could do with a
little self-doubt. He believed that people are justified in
defending what they have become accustomed to. ‘Justice’
and ‘fairness’ are slogans propping up particular struggles,
not eternal principles, and reform is a zero-sum game.
However, what is true for the defenders of the status quo,
Holmes felt, should also be true for those attacking it. In
1850 the abolitionists seemed to most Northerners, danger-
ous subversives. Less than 15 years later, they were patriots.
In the USA, during the 70 years that Holmes lived after the
war, the chief struggle was between capital and labour.
Nearly every judicial opinion for which he became known
constituted an intervention in that struggle and his funda-
mental concern was almost always to permit all parties to
use democratic means to attempt to make their interests
prevail. Thus, while he himself was a conservative, many of
his judgements supported radical, often socialist, civil liberty
causes. On the other hand he did not personally believe the
notion that civil liberties were owed to people simply because
they are human. Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial
defender of economic reform and free speech. He thus came
to be fêted by supporters of causes he did not believe in.
That he could accept this with equanimity harks back to his
wartime admiration for his friend who fought with great
valour for a cause he did not believe in.
The ideas of Charles Saunders Peirce (1839–1914)
Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’) studied at Harvard and in 1861
joined the US Coast Survey, the most prestigious scientific
institution in the United States at that time. At the Coast
Survey Peirce was an energetic and formidable scientist (de
Waal, 2003). In 1879 while remaining at the Coast Survey he
joined the newly founded Johns Hopkins University as a
logic instructor. The greatest philosophical influence on
Peirce was Kant: he saw himself as constructing the
philosophical system that Kant might have developed had
he known about logic. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) (who
replaced Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy in
Glasgow and is remembered as Hume’s most famous critic)
and other common-sense philosophers became increasingly
important in Peirce’s thinking: in late writings the two
influences were combined in ‘critical common-sensism.’
His brilliant career and high scientific reputation were
ruined as a result of suspicions about his religious beliefs and
his divorce and remarriage in 1883. He lost his position at
Johns Hopkins and was finally forced to resign from the
Coast Survey in 1891. Peirce drifted into poverty. James’s
adoption of the term pragmatism, which he credited to
Peirce, was motivated by a desire to boost Peirce’s standing.
Peirce died in 1914. His papers were taken to Harvard where
100 000 pages of manuscript are now held. Currently a 30-
volume chronological edition of his papers, The Writings of
Charles S. Peirce, is underway at Indiana University.
Peirce on philosophy
As was fashionable in the 19th century, Peirce spent much
time and energy in developing a philosophical classification
of the sciences. As de Waal (2003) describes it, he defined
science broadly as the activity of a group of men and women
who have devoted themselves to inquiring into truth for
truth’s sake. He then divided science into mathematics and
what he called the ‘positive sciences’. Mathematics, for
Peirce, is the discipline that draws necessary conclusions
from ideal or purely hypothetical constructions. Within pure
mathematics, Peirce maintained, we do not care whether
these constructions, or even their conclusions, apply to

anything real. In this respect mathematics differs from the
positive sciences, which aim to gain some positive knowledge
about reality. Next Peirce divided the positive sciences into
philosophy and the ‘special sciences’. Special sciences
include, for instance, physics, neurophysiology and medieval
history. Philosophy studies the facts of everyday life in the
most general sense possible. Its purpose is to furnish us with
a general conception of the world we live in, which can act as
a basis for the special sciences. For Peirce, philosophy itself
can be divided into three areas: (i) phenomenology, (ii) the
normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics and logic dealing with
beauty, goodness and truth) and (iii) metaphysics. He
believed phenomenology to be the most basic of the three.
Peirce on phenomenology and semiotics
According to Peirce the central task of phenomenology is to
bring order to the manifold of phenomena that appear
before the mind. One way of doing this is by inquiring
whether there are certain general characteristics that can be
found in all phenomena, no matter whether they are forced
upon us by outward experience, highly abstract conclusions
of theoretical physics, or colourful products of the most
vivid nightmares. Such circumstances Peirce calls categories.
He found only three, which he calls firstness, secondness and
thirdness, defined as follows: ‘(something) is blue’ is a one-
place predicate; ‘(someone) respects (someone else)’ is a
dyadic, two-place relationship; ‘(someone) gives (something)
to (someone else)’ is a triadic, three-place relationship. Peirce
agues that language adequate for scientific descriptive
purposes must contain terms of all these three kinds, but
that there are no phenomena that can only be described in a
language which contains expressions for four-place relations.
This position aligned him with epistemological realism (the
statement ‘snow is white’ is only true if snow really is white
independent of our thought and talk) rather than with
nominalism (the truth of the statement ‘snow is white’
depends only on the word ‘white’ itself, whose existence
depends on a particular language).
According to Peirce, the most important forms of
thirdness involve meaning and representation, and all of
his works are underpinned by a sophisticated theory of
meaning, his semiotics. Peirce and the Swiss scholar
Ferdinand de Sausurre (1857–1913) are usually credited as
the (independent) initiators of semiotics as a field of study.
Peirce especially made two distinctions. First, every sign
involves the sign itself (eg a word such as ‘cat’), an object
(eg cat) and an interpretant (eg you or me). Second, he
distinguished three kinds of signs: icons, which are like the
objects signified (eg naturalistic paintings); natural signs (eg
clouds signifying rain); and conventional signs (eg red for
danger, and at least the majority of words). Iconic signs
share some feature with their object, which each would
possess if the other did not exist. Maps (for instance, survey
or road maps) are straightforward examples, the conventions
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 897
governing their use fixing how we are to interpret them as
icons. Mathematical and logical symbolisms are iconic
representations, and it was important for Peirce that
sentences of natural languages have iconic elements too.
Semiotics is usually divided into three fields: semantics, the
study of meaning; syntactics, the study of (surface ‘gram-
matical’ and also ‘deep’) structure; and pragmatics, which
deals with the extra-linguistic purposes and effects of
communications. From semiotics the schools of thought of
structuralism and poststructuralism developed in Paris in the
1950s and 1960s.
Peirce on the theory of inquiry and pragmatism
Peirce based his approach to epistemology in the 1860s and
1870s on his years of experience of scientific work in
laboratories. He believed that all scientific activity is
grounded in the hope that the universe is intelligible, and
intelligible to us: we are to take seriously no hypothesis that
‘blocks the road of inquiry’, forcing us to accept regularities
as brute or inexplicable. He rejected the approach of
Descartes (1596–1650), who suggested that a responsible
investigator should carry out a solitary investigation of his/
her cognitive standing. Peirce said investigations should be a
cooperative venture. He also said that while Descartes’s
sceptical arguments prompt philosophical doubt about what
occasions no real doubt, ordinary investigations take for
granted all the propositions we find certain as we begin the
inquiry. Ordinary inquiry is impressed by the number and
variety of the arguments supporting a conclusion, while the
Cartesian requires a single indubitable train of reasoning to
ground any belief.
Peirce believed we should adopt the ‘method of science’,
which holds that ‘there are real things, whose characters are
entirely independent of our opinions about them; those
realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and
though our sensations are as different as our relations to the
objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception,
we ascertain by reasoning how things really are’. Peirce was
a ‘contrite fallibilist’: any of our current certainties might
turn out to be mistaken, but relying upon them will not
prevent our making cognitive progress and any errors will
emerge with time. This was a Darwinian argument.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1892) held a particular
fascination for the members of the Metaphysical Club. He
had published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection in 1859. It was not so much the theory of evolution
(providing as it did an alternative to the design theory of
creation) that fascinated the pragmatists, but the process of
natural selection itself, a process based on chance errors.
This chimed with Peirce’s own experience with making
measurements at the Coast Survey. They concluded that
science was not just a question of resolving the uncertainties
of fixed categories and laws. Not only were observations and
measurements uncertain, but the categories and laws were
898 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
themselves part of a dynamic process changing over time,
the laws were the result of chance, and the decision to treat a
particular law as absolute is a pragmatic one: laws are
adaptive. The resulting explanations in Peirce’s Metaphysi-
cal Club paper on Design and Chance, which are couched
in terms of ‘habits’, sound strange today: ‘Systems of
compounds which have bad habits are quickly destroyed,
those which have no habits follow the same course; only
those which have good habits tend to survive.’ The habits he
is referring to can be the long neck of a giraffe or gravity:
‘Why y do the heavenly bodies tend to attract one another?
Because in the long run bodies that repel or do not attract
will get thrown out of the region of space leaving only the
mutually attracting bodies.’ On reflection this explanation is
no stranger than those of physicists today.
Peirce’s ‘pragmatic principle’, a rule for clarifying the
content of concepts and hypotheses, forms part of his theory
of inquiry: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably
have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our
conception (a sign, a word, a communication) to have. Then,
our conception of these effects is the whole of our
conception of the object.’ Peirce illustrates the value of his
approach by clarifying our conception of truth and reality. If
a proposition is true, then anyone who investigated the
matter long enough and well enough would eventually
acknowledge the truth: truth is a matter of long-term
convergence of opinion. ‘The opinion which is fated to be
ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate, is what we
mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is
the real’ (Peirce, 1878).
Much of Peirce’s later work attempted to use his semiotics
to provide a proof of his pragmatic principle. Science, he
argued, is itself a process of sign interpretation. Peirce
models all inductive reasoning on statistical sampling:
quantitative induction involves attempting to estimate the
chance of a member of a population having a particular
property, and qualitative induction tests hypotheses by
sampling their consequences. He denies that induction ever
establishes that a conclusion is true or even probable.
Rather, the practice of inductive testing is justified because
continued use of it will eventually lead us to converge on the
correct value for the chance of a member of the population
having the property in question.
Menand summarizes Peirce’s life work as follows: ‘What
does it mean to say we ‘know’ something in a world in which
things happen higgledy-pigglety? Virtually all of Charles
Peirce’s work—an enormous body of writing on logic,
semiotics, mathematics, astronomy, metrology, physics,
psychology, and philosophy, large parts of it unpublished
or unfinished—was devoted to this question. His answer had
many parts, and fitting them all together—in a form
consistent with his belief in the existence of a personal
God—became the burden of his life. But one part of his
answer was that in a universe in which events are uncertain
and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter
of individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects
differently—even the same mind reflects differently at
different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t
stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. Peirce’s
conclusion was that knowledge must therefore be social.
It was his most important contribution to American
thoughty’ (Menand, 2001, pp 199–200).
The ideas of William James (1842–1910)
William James and Henry James, the author, were sons of
Henry James, a Swedenborgian religious thinker. Henry
James Sr did not believe in the formal education of the day.
He moved William from school to school. William later
declared that he lacked formal education and felt a bit of a
sham as a professor. The openness that characterizes both
the style and the import of his writings on pragmatism
seemed to some of his followers to have been specifically a
consequence of his disorganized schooling. His lack of
school or academic tradition meant that James could
honestly feel that he was responsible for his beliefs to no-
one but himself.
In 1861 James went to Harvard to study first chemistry,
then natural history and finally medicine. He came to admire
Louis Agassiz (a member of the Saturday Club), whose
expedition to Brazil he joined in 1865. Agassiz intended to
gather evidence to refute the evolutionary theories of Charles
Darwin. In 1869 James obtained his MD from Harvard,
where he taught anatomy from 1872 and philosophy from
1882. A professor from 1885, he changed his professorial
title in 1889 from philosophy to psychology.
James transformed the complex and obscurely expressed
opinions of Peirce into the popular philosophy of pragma-
tism. He also described himself as a radical empiricist. He
influenced both the behaviouristic and the introspective
branches of psychology. In his Principles of Psychology
(1890) he places psychology firmly on a physiological basis
and represents the mind as an instrument for coping with the
world. He exercised great influence on politicians, who like
Mussolini often misunderstood him, and on writers, such as
his pupil Gertrude Stein.
James on psychology
James’s famous book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is
committed to the scientific study of mind, conceived as the
ascertainment of the ‘empirical correlation of the various
sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the
brain.’ For these purposes he assumes the existence of a
physical world independent of mind. For James, mind is
identified with consciousness, known primarily through
introspection. Scientific psychology explores the physical
basis and biological function of consciousness; this is
evidently to assist an organism to cope with its environment

more flexibly than can inherited behavioural patterns. The
criterion for the presence of mind is, therefore, the
occurrence of behaviour, which reaches the same goal, as
circumstances alter, through different means. The most
famous theme in the Principles is the notion of a ‘stream of
conscience’ (or thought) which is generated afresh each
moment by the current state of the whole brain and reacts
back on to it, and hence on behaviour, with a modicum of
free spontaneity.
James distinguishes between the I and the Me. The I is the
ultimate thinker. The Me divides into the material Me, the
social Me (the images I present to the various communities
to which I belong) and the spiritual Me. The ultimate I is the
momentary thinker of the total present thought. Personal
identity through time consists in the fact that I of one
moment adopts the Mes and Is of earlier times by the
peculiarly warm and intimate way in which it recollects them
(James plays particular attention to the case of multiple
personality in developing his account).
Schopenhauer, a German philosopher inspired by Kant, is
associated with the notion that the will is more basic than
thought in both man and nature, a line of thought that was
elaborated by several neo-Kantian thinkers who stressed the
controlling dominance of practical over theoretical reason.
James’s approach to the problem of free will dates from 1879
when he went through a period of serious psychological
depression. He was rescued from his depression partly by
discovering Charles Renouvier’s defence of free will as ‘the
sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might
have other thoughts.’ James believed that the old argument
as to whether we have free will or whether all our actions are
determined by what has gone before cannot be resolved
analytically or empirically. However, by choosing to believe
that we do have free will and acting accordingly we do
indeed seem to enjoy free will: the outcome is better. ‘My
first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.’ He
believed we should exercise ‘the will to believe’, it must
become a habit. ‘Life shall be built in doing and suffering
and creating.’ This method of breaking free from endless
debilitating introspection by doing is typical of James’s
pragmatism.
James on religion
James was a religious thinker. He believed that life is and has
to be a moral struggle if we are not to collapse into the
passivity of defeat; and this struggle in turn must reach out
towards some religious aspirations of faith to sustain it. His
classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience (published
in 1902) studies the phenomena of mysticism and religious
experience with a view to an eventual empirical assessment
of their validity. Despite his interest in religion James never
speaks from within faith. He remarks in one of his letters
‘Although religion is the greatest interest of my life, I am
rather hopelessly nonevangelical, and take the whole thing
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 899
too impersonally’ (Barrett, 1978, p 273). However, he has
been criticized by secular-minded pragmatists for leaning too
far in the direction of religion.
William Barrett suggests that as a philosopher James gets
too caught up in questions of the status of beliefs and would
have been better to follow a more pragmatic line: ‘But as a
pragmatist he should have held fast to the fact that doing is
more basic than belief, and that in the domain of religion the
doing that is fundamental is the act of prayer’ (Barrett, 1978,
p 257).
James on pragmatism
The best known of James’s purely philosophical works is
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
(James, 1907), which he dedicated to John Stuart Mill (1806–
1873). James takes over from Peirce the idea that the
meaning of a concept lies in its practical bearings but puts it
to different uses. Truth, for James’s pragmatism, consists in
useful ideas. Their utility may lie in the power they confer to
predict experience or their encouragement of valuable
emotion and behaviour. James’s other chief philosophical
doctrine is radical empiricism, the view that the ultimate
stuff of reality (or at least all knowable reality) is pure
experience.
In Pragmatism James defines pragmatism as follows: ‘[a
pragmatist] turns away from abstractions and insufficiency,
from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and
origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy,
towards facts, towards action and towards power’ (James,
1907, p 28). Pragmatism, he says, is a ‘method only’, an
‘attitude of orientation.’ ‘The attitude of looking away from
the first things, principles, ‘categories’, supposed necessities;
and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences,
facts’ (James, 1907, p 29).
Further, James suggests that pragmatism has come to be
used in a still wider sense as a theory of truth. He cites
Dewey and FCS Schiller (the Oxford 20th-century British
philosopher) as the sources of the pragmatist view of truth.
‘Everywhere, these teachers say ‘truth’ in our ideas and
beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It
means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which
themselves are but part of our experience) become true just
in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with
other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get
about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of
following the interminable succession of particular phenom-
ena’ (James, 1907, p 30; italics in original).
James also attributes to Dewey and Schiller his description
of the way that new opinions (beliefs) are adopted. Accor-
ding to this view, individuals hold stocks of opinions until
they hear of a fact that is incompatible with those opinions.
They try to hold on to their original opinions until a new
idea is discovered which can be ‘graft[ed] upon the ancient
900 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea
that mediates between the stock and the new experience and
runs them into one another most felicitously and expedi-
ently’ (James, 1907, p 31). This anticipates the line taken by
Thomas Kuhn in his influential book published in 1962,
The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Kuhn, 1962).
William Barrett, an existentialist, observes: ‘James is
considered to be wooly minded, intellectually impressionis-
tic, too subjective and emotional in his approach to qualify
as a really rigorous thinker. This was a prevalent attitude
during the decades when Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and
Russellian logic dominated philosophy. Russell himself, as
one of the sharpest critics of pragmatism, has helped to
propagate a general disdain to what appeared to be sloppy
thinking generally y..Two changes in the philosophical
climate during recent decades [Barrett was writing in 1978]
combine to alter this disparaging judgement of James. First
is the widespread influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [1889–
1951] later thought which considerably undermines the
imperial claims of Russellian logic. Wittgenstein in fact
pursues a fundamentally pragmatic analysis of language to
far more drastic lengths than any of the pragmatistsyy.
The second change in the intellectual climate has been the
advent of existentialism as a major movement of con-
temporary thought [originated by Martin Heidegger (1889–
1976)]. In the wake of the existentialist thinkers we are much
less disposed to find fault with James for philosophizing in a
personal and emotional modeyy. He isy.. a thinker of
very great force’ (Barrett, 1978, pp 255–256).
The ideas of John Dewey (1859–1952)
Dewey was born in Burlington Vermont and was educated
at the University there. For more than 40 years students
at the University of Vermont were trained in what was
known as the Burlington Philosophy, a transcendentalist
philosophy based on the superiority of ‘free intuition’. The
initiator of the philosophy, James Marsh, wanted to resist
the divorce between matters of philosophy and matters of
faith. He thought he had found the solution in the writings
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the poet and philosopher)
whose approach was based on his understanding of Kant. In
the Emersonian New England Transcendentalism intuition
meant feelings, feelings that could be taken to obviate the
need for systematic thinking according to its critics; in
contrast, in Vermont Transcendentalism intuition meant
introspection and analysis, resulting in a much tighter
approach. Marsh later realized that Coleridge’s writings
had misled him and that Kant provided an inadequate
foundation for the integration of knowledge. He turned to
the work of Hegel (1770–1831), who completed the revision
of Kant that Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) had begun. According to
Hegel reality is an idea in the mind of the absolute (Menand,
2001, p 263). Marsh died in 1842.
When Dewey moved from the University of Vermont to
continue his studies at Johns Hopkins he chose to work with
George Sylvester Morris, a fellow Vermonter and a Hegelian
with an antipathy to British empiricism. Hegel turned out to
be just what Dewey was looking for in his search for a
philosophy that gave a guide to living. Many years later he
reflected: ‘Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and
spirit, the divine and the human, was y. no mere intellectual
formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation.
Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the
arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing
walls, and had a special attraction for me.’ One of the
set texts at Hopkins was Grundzüge des Physiologischen
Psychologie by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). This set out a
science-based approach to psychology referred to as the new
psychology. Dewey determined to integrate this new
psychology, evolutionary theory, hegelianism and christian-
ity. He later abandoned hegelian idealism, developing a
biologically based evolutionary philosophy and becoming
committed to experimentation.
Dewey was the leading exponent of pragmatism in
succession to Peirce and James. He did not like the term
pragmatism but he was flattered by James, who credited him
with founding a school of thought at Chicago. James at that
time was something of a celebrity and his opinion mattered.
Dewey developed a systematic pragmatism addressing the
central questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and
aesthetics.
While at the University of Chicago Dewey was deeply
affected by his first hand observation of the famous 1894
Pullman strike, the violence and the subsequent court cases.
As Menand puts it: ‘For the strike showed what a tangle of
contradictions and anachronisms lay in the accumulated
mixture of Christian piety, laissez-faire economics, natural
law doctrine, scientific determinism, and popular Darwinism
that characterized many people’s attitude in the decades
after the Civil War’ (Menand, 2001, p 299). In accord with
his philosophical views, Dewey became deeply involved in
the social issues of the day, especially with the reform of
American schools, but also with matters of national and
international politics. Modern philosophers who acknowl-
edge a debt to Dewey include Hilary Putman (1926–), Jürgen
Habermas (1929–) and Richard Rorty (1931–) (Festenstein,
1997).
Dewey on inquiry
Dewey’s theory of inquiry is a general account of how
thought functions, not in an abstract or purely formal mode,
but in the inquiries of successful science and in the problem-
solving of ordinary daily life. Dewey defined inquiry as the
transformation of a puzzling indeterminate situation into
one that is sufficiently unified to warranted assertion or

coherent action. What is required is the application of
intelligent inquiry, the self-correcting method of experimen-
tally testing hypotheses created and refined from our
previous experience. The approach can be applied as much
to morals and politics as physics and chemistry. Testing may
be in the laboratory or it could be legislation that changes
some function of government. In all cases there is a social
context mediating both the terms of the initial problem and
its solution. The social context is in turn changed by the
inquiry.
Dewey asserts that no knowledge claim, no moral rule,
principle, or ideal is ever certain, immune from all possible
criticism and revision (epistemological and moral fallibi-
lism). However, he believed that progress can be made by the
cultivation of intelligent habits in individuals and the
maintenance of social structures that encourage continuous
inquiry.
Dewey on education
Dewey argued that children should not be understood as
empty vessels passively waiting for knowledge to be poured
in. Rather they should be seen as active centres of impulse,
shaped by but also shaping their environment. Children will
develop habits of one sort or another in the course of their
interactions with their social and physical surroundings. So,
if we want those habits to be flexible and intelligent, then we
must do our best to structure an environment that will allow
and provoke the operations of intelligent inquiry. Rather
than studying theory, pupils should engage in practical
activities with theory being drawn in as necessary. Dewey
sought to apply his theories in a school, which he established
at the University of Chicago.
In 1896, The University Elementary School of the
University of Chicago opened with 16 children, all under
12, and two teachers. By 1902 there were 140 students, 23
teachers and 10 graduate students working as assistants. It
had become an international sensation and was known as
the Dewey School. Its official name became the Laboratory
School; it was a philosophy laboratory, a place where the
new pychology and Dewey himself could find legitimacy.
As Dewey later put it: it was a place ‘to work out in the
concrete, instead of merely in the head or on paper, a theory
of the unity of knowledge.’
Dewey’s goal for children, and indeed for adults, was
growth, growth in powers, in capacities for experience.
Growth was both an end and a means. Knowledge is
inseparable from doing. At the Laboratory School therefore
the children were involved in workshop-type projects in
which learning was accomplished in a manner that simulated
the way Dewey thought it was accomplished in real life:
through group activity. For instance, one such activity was
the children cooking lunch once a week. Preparing a meal is
a goal-directed activity, it is a social activity, and it is an
activity continuous with life outside school. Incorporated
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 901
into the practical business of making lunch were arithmetic,
chemistry, physics, geography and so on. Cooking became
the basis for most of the science taught in the school. As
cooking established the link with home, other activities
established the link with industry and business. There was
much work, for example, with iron: the children built their
own tiny smelters.
Dewey on politics, justice and democracy
Dewey was a tireless critic of economic injustice and
oligarchy. He was sympathetic to American socialism
(Decker, 2003). Along with Aristotle (384–322 BC) and
Hume (1711–1776) Dewey was in today’s terms a ‘political
naturalist’. Political naturalism starts from the argument
that ideas in the natural sciences can contribute to a
philosophical point of view of politics and society: the fact of
humans as living, embodied ‘political animals’ is crucial in
understanding the processes of justification and criticism in
political theory. For instance, the biological activity of social
interactions both preserves and furthers shared meanings.
Thus meaning emerges out our biological activity, emer-
gence that cannot be reduced to its component units of
biological acts. The coupling of meaningfulness and the
organism–environment relationship is a distinctive pragma-
tist contribution to all areas of philosophy (Decker, 2003).
Dewey also holds a distinctive view about how the basic
objects of political life are to be justified when challenged.
He rejects the attempts of Hobbes (1588–1679), Locke
(1632–1704) and others to provide a justification for the state
or natural rights as demands of reason or self-interest.
Rather he thought that there are certain basic facts about the
nature of humans as a certain kind of evolved organism
interacting with both an unpredictable and constantly
changing physical environment and a highly articulated
social environment (Decker, 2003). This led to an interest in
the anthropology of early cultures and in modern family and
community institutions as well as nation states themselves.
He saw the proper method of philosophical criticism as that
of genetic analysis, which is the tracing of the history of ideas
and institutions in order to compare the actual causes and
consequences to those they were originally intended to
produce. This is consistent with Dewey’s instrumentalist
view that, because all human action can be analysed in terms
of means and ends, concepts and theories are properly
conceived of as tools to more abstract or complicated ends.
Matters of justice preoccupied Dewey. As an empiricist he
rejected the idea that there is some ideal standard of justice.
He started, as did Socrates before him, with the notion that
we know justice by comparing acts we call just with those we
call unjust; justice comes from concrete, participative daily
life and is inevitably diluted in any abstract ideal or principle
of justice. Further, abstract principles of justice do not allow
for multiple standpoints, such as participant, critic, observer,
willing learner, in the debate over political principles and
902 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
projects. Dewey also adds an aesthetic element to justice and
politics: judgements can be made about the quality of
experience for all of us in engaging in the political process
(Decker, 2003).
For Dewey, democracy is both a goal and a means. The
continuity of change that characterizes our world and the
replacement of one generation by another implies what
Dewey understood as a ‘continual rhythm of disequilibra-
tions and recoveries of equilibrium’. We need our best
thoughts and actions of the entire community in order to
reconstruct our equilibrium, not only because the commu-
nity sets the conditions for recovery, but also because we
have no antecedent assurance of the source or nature of the
reconstruction. It is always experimental, and Dewey took
democracy both to be and to further that grand experiment.
Dewey derided ‘spectator’ theories of knowledge, suggest-
ing that they are supported by a self-aggrandizing view of
philosophy, philosophy as priesthood (Festenstein, 1997). In
contrast he insisted on the centrality of practical problem-
solving to inquiry: all ‘controlled inquiry and all institution
of grounded assertion necessarily contains a practical factor,
an activity of doing and making which reshapes antecedent
intellectual material which sets the problem of inquiry’
(Dewey, 1937). Dewey shifted the emphasis on philosophy
from the big ‘wholesale’ questions of metaphysics and
epistemology to the empirically specific ‘retail’ problems of
specific individuals and groups. Political philosophy is not
about discovering truths that rationally persuade diverse
people nor is it about binding principles that can be used to
coerce. Political philosophy is more about method; it is a
messy retail business of clarification, criticism and adjudica-
tion. Dewey called his philosophy ‘instrumentalism’ (Decker,
2003).
The impact of pragmatism: adherents and critics
Pragmatism had a mixed reception in Europe. In Britain
FCS Schiller was an enthusiastic follower of James and FP
Ramsey and AJ Ayer endorsed pivotal aspects of Peirce’s
thought. However, FH Bradley objected to the subordina-
tion of cognition to practice because of the inherent
incompleteness of all merely practical interests. GE Moore
(1873–1958) criticized James’s identification of true beliefs
with useful ones, among other reasons because utility is
changeable over time. Bertrand Russell objected that beliefs
can be useful but plainly false. On the continent, despite
some Italian enthusiasm, various philosophers have dis-
approvingly seen in pragmatism’s concern for practical
efficacy the expression of characteristically American social
attitudes: crass materialism and naı̈ve democratism. Prag-
matism was thus looked down upon as a quintessentially
American philosophy, a philosophical expression of Amer-
ican go-getter spirit with its success-orientated ideology and
a manifestation of a populist repugnance to the long-
established ideological tendencies of European philosophy.
Dewey’s argument was that abstract principles cannot
determine actions because ends cannot be separated from
means. Thus, we might support overthrowing tyrannies in
principle, but, if the means of ridding a people of tyranny
involves many of them dying, we might have second
thoughts. Or again, the strength of our opposition to global
warming might be tested if nuclear power turns out to be the
only feasible option for significantly reducing carbon
monoxide emissions in time. Once the means are examined,
empirical questions are raised. How many people might die
in overthrowing the tyranny? Is nuclear the only feasible
option? Is the global warming problem urgent or can longer-
term options be developed? Thus, Dewey argues that
political questions cannot be resolved by arguments about
abstract principles; it is not ends (however admirable) that
should determine what to do but the outcomes of the means
adopted. What the outcomes are likely to be is an empirical
question on which factual evidence and scientific analysis
can be brought to bear. Each issue has to be argued through
on the merits of the case against the background of a
particular history and context. The answers might be
different at different times and in different contexts.
In the USA pragmatism was met with a widely favourable
response and has it adherents to this day. However, as
philosophy grew and became more professional, individual
philosophers became much more narrowly focussed in areas
such as logical positivism, symbolic logic and rigorous
language analysis, and became more specialized in different
areas of application. As Festenstein explains, ‘On the one
front Dewey’s meliorist [meliorism is a doctrine that the
world may be made better by human effort] vision of the
person and ethics was eclipsed by more turbulent concep-
tions of the human condition, to be found in Jean-Paul
Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, psychoanalysis and other sources.
At the same time, the philosophical ground was shifting.
Under the influence of the logical empiricism espoused with
notable force by émigré philosophers such as Rudolph
Carnap, Alfred Tarski and Hans Reichenbach a technical
conception of philosophy for which formal logic was central
came to dominate mainstream professional philosophy in
the United States. Underpinning this was a view of
philosophy as concerned with what could be known with
certaintyy.Dewey’s more contextual conception of philo-
sophy seemed to muddy the clear waters of epistemology
and logical analysis with contingent historical facts and
seemed too diffuse y. in the new intellectual climate,’
(Festenstein, 1997, p 103). American Universities came to
cover all aspects of philosophy and adherents of all schools
of thought are to be found. Even in the USA therefore
pragmatism lost its special place. After the Second World
War, the recognition of uncertainty that Dewey’s approach
to politics and democracy entailed fell out of favour in the

years of the Cold War. Today enthusiasm for Dewey’s
political views lies largely outside philosophy.
Pragmatism has not had a monopoly on common sense
thinking on practical issues. GE Moore was for a time very
influential in the English speaking world with his approach
to philosophy based on common sense. Marx and Habermas
both place praxis in an increasingly technical world at
the centre of their thinking. Today the critical theory of
Habermas and others provides an alternative, and a
generally more popular philosophy of practice in European
academic circles.
Festenstein sees the ideas of Habermas, Putman and
Rorty as alternative developments of Dewey’s approach,
(Festenstein, 1997). He suggests that ‘the view of Dewey as
concerned principally with implications of ‘scientific method’
for the treatment of ethical, social and political problems, or
as the exponent of a theory hypothesized by technological
achievement while lacking any distinctive morality, is
mistaken’ (p 12). Dewey’s empirical theory of value ‘appears
more as a criticism of instrumental rationality than a
product of naı̈ve scientism. That theory’s purpose is to
clarify how rival moral, ideological and political positions
may be subject to rational appraisal and social criticism
[and] be given a rational groundingythis account can be
properly understood only if it is seen alongside the ethical
and psychological ideas of Dewy’s ‘theory of moral life’. At
its core is a teleological conception of human self-develop-
ment as intrinsically social and cooperative which is held to
support and clarify the requirements of moralityyThrough
the conception of individuality, liberalism is linked to
democracy, the term at the centre of Dewey’s political
thought’ (pp 12–13).
Habermas’s communicative ethics attempt to make the
‘Deweyan connection between practical reason, communica-
tion and democracy’ (Festenstein, 1997, p 14). Habermas
places a view of the development of politics and modern
society (the Frankfurt School’s synthesis of the Marxist
emphasis on interest and coercion and the Freudian concept
of alienation) at the centre of his philosophizing. Ideology is
relevant to the conditions of public debate. These conditions
should involve the creation of a public ‘sphere’, in which
issues of concern to the community can (in principle) be
openly debated, and decisions arrived at that are based upon
reason rather than upon tradition or the fiat of the powerful.
Ideology should be the subject of critique to uncover modes
in which ideas are governed by forces other than conscious,
rational processes. Habermas makes the case that, in the
contemporary world, science and technology become bound
up with ideology: the dominant ideology becoming one of
‘technocratic consciousness’. His philosophy (critical theory)
supports the continual identification and rooting out
of ideologically tainted arguments and language. In this
sense it is revolutionary in intent, continuously challenging
the status quo.
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 903
Putman (a student of Quine) tries to steer a path between
objectivity linked to science and its denial, relativism. His
‘internal realism’ instead elaborates a conception of objec-
tivity which does not aspire to independence of perspective
or values. He places this conception of objectivity or
rationality as part of an overarching ‘total ideal’ of human
good. Putman has increasingly turned to pragmatist tradi-
tions of thinking, celebrating the classical pragmatists not
only as precursors of the epistemological claims of internal
realism, but for integrating these claims in an overarching
ethical project (Festenstein, 1997; Norris, 2005).
Rorty has developed a somewhat extreme position,
sometimes described as pragmatist, sometimes as postmo-
dern. Like most philosophers he does not like labels but he
accepts that he is a postmodern relativist if by that is meant
someone who does not believe there is one true description
of the way the world is (Marchetti, 2003). Rorty describes his
preferred stance of ‘irony’ as the opposite of common sense.
Ironists are people who have radical and continuing doubts
about the vocabulary they use, who can not use their own
vocabulary to get rid of these doubts, and who do not think
that their vocabulary is closer to reality than others. (Rorty,
1989). This emphasis on language, Rorty suggests, means
that you can talk about linguistic behaviour and do not
really need to talk about experience or consciousness
(Marchetti, 2003). Rorty proceeds by arguing that liberal
and democratic practices, rather than being justified by
foundations, can be justified by comparison with the
alternatives and agreed within communities using their
particular language and cultural practices (a form of
ethnocentrism). This position contrasts with that of Dewey,
who believed that epistemology was worth pursuing in order
to guide future practice.
Postmodernism, despite its designed-to-shock presenta-
tion, has a resonance with pragmatism in its rejection of
grand philosophical frameworks, meta-narratives and ideo-
logies. However, pragmatism generally resists the postmo-
dern ideas that ‘anything goes’, all truths are relative and
that science is but one among many equally valid narratives.
A greater potential conflict lies with those who advocate
realism. Pragmatism (or at least some aspects of it, for some
philosophers, for some of the time) is based on idealism, a
position under attack from, among others, the critical
realists (Bhaskar, 1989; Norris, 1997). Critical realism has,
however, yet to establish itself and may find it difficult to do
so now that its originator and inspiration, Roy Bhaskar, has
apparently turned to theology and idealism (Potter, 2003). In
fact the pragmatists are rather difficult to pin down on this
score. For instance, James seems to have concluded that the
metaphysical truth was that the physical consists of our own
inner experience of itself (an idealist position). On the other
hand for the best analysis of our ordinary conception of
things he opted for a ‘new realist’ position for which the
physical world consists in sensory vistas only some of them
in minds. Both positions were included in his account of
904 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
‘radical empiricism’. The realism–idealism debate seems
likely to continue.
Rorty has said that what he got out of reading the
classical pragmatists is just the idea that there are no
privileged descriptions and that therefore there is not much
point in asking, ‘Is our way of talking about things objective
or subjective?’ He thinks of pragmatists as the people who
did the best job of getting rid of the subject/object distinction
(Marchetti, 2003). However, pragmatist philosophers are
sometimes depicted as falling into two groups. The
subjectivists following in the footsteps of James include
FCS Schiller and Rorty, and the objectivists following in the
footsteps of Peirce include FP Ramsey, CI Lewis and
Carnap. For the subjectivists the question ‘what works’ is
answered personally, in other words ‘what works for person
X’. For the objectivists the question ‘what works’ is
answered impersonally, in other words what works effi-
ciently and effectively for the realization of some appropriate
purpose. For Dewey the answer is given in terms of social
interpersonalism. He thus straddles the two positions.
A brief summary
Before moving on to consider where pragmatism might be
applied by OR practitioners and academics, an account of
the basic characteristics of the philosophy by Pfeiffer
provides a brief summary:
(1) Questions of the meaning of language are best resolved
by studying the practical consequences of the ideas and
statements in question.
(2) The extent to which an idea fulfills important human
goals clarifies the idea and also provides important
evidence for and against the likelihood of truth.
(3) There is no real need for and little to be gained from
pursuit of a First Philosophy in Descartes’ sense [In
Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes tries to
establish a firm basis for belief in the existence of
man and God as a foundation for philosophy], or of a
foundation of all value, or of some set of basic truths
that will answer the great philosophical questions.
(4) Sharp, fixed distinctions of thought and reality are not
reflected in nature, where one thing fades into another,
one flows into another and the complexity of our
thought is clarified only by theories that give tentative
illumination to reality.
(5) Enlightenment by some form of a priori knowledge is
illusory. Even the definitions of our terms may be
changed later, as inquiry proceeds.
(6) Whatever promotes reasoned dialogue, inquiry and
further understanding is good, and what stifles is bad.
Can one be a strict pragmatist? It seems unlikely if one is
to steer clear of dualisms, recognize the tentative nature of
concepts and theories and avoid commitment to a supposed
First Philosophy. Pragmatism does not merely reach out in
all directions to all forms of thought: it is self-conscious and
self-reflective and self-critical. That is, it is prone to examine
its own ideas as tentative. We may one day need to
reformulate parts of some of our thinking about ourselves.
And finally, no parts of our thinking are immune to the
weight of evidence that might come in future experience’
(Pfeiffer, 2003).
Pragmatism and operational research
Churchman and Ackoff
Pragmatism has come to OR most directly through the work
of the pioneering operational research and systems thinkers,
Churchman (1971, 1979) and Ackoff (1979, 1981). Both were
students of the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Arthur Singer,
Jr (1873–1954). At the turn of the century Singer, a civil
engineer in his youth, became assistant to William James at
Harvard. He later took up a post in the Philosophy
Department of the University of Pennsylvania developing
his own version of pragmatism. In an era dominated by
technology Singer argued that philosophy as thinking had to
give way to philosophy as doing. No longer was philosophy
to be conceived as the exclusive activity of thinkers telling
men of action what to do. The ideal was continuous
progress; progress could be achieved through experiment as
well as experience, an approach referred to as ‘experimental
idealism’. This new mission for philosophy was taken up by
Churchman and Ackoff.
Churchman’s thinking has its roots in the philosophy of
pragmatism in general and in Singer’s version in particular.
He developed the idea of ‘inquiring systems’, defining the
characteristics of Lockean (start with a blank sheet and
gather evidence), Leibnizean (start with the current body of
knowledge and extend it), Kantian (examine evidence and
the current body of knowledge from one’s own perspective),
Hegelian (engage in a process of dialectical reasoning) and
Singerian inquiring systems. According to Mitroff and
Turoff (1973) the Singerian inquiring system can be thought
of as a management theory for applying other inquiring
systems: starting with logic, other sciences are then
introduced, a process described by Churchman as ‘sweeping
in’. In doing so, the Singerian inquirer becomes now and
then a Leibnizian, a Lockean, a Kantian and a Hegalian
inquirer. For Churchman it was vital that the analyst should
examine how any situation would be understood by different
inquiring systems, an idea that led him to a dialectical
approach (Churchman, 1971). Churchman requires the
analyst to take a rather heroic role: to conduct inquiry
that is scientific, that includes the whole system potentially
relevant to a problem, and that designs social systems
in terms of ‘inquiring systems’ and the ‘enemies’ (Ulrich,
2004).
According to Jackson (2000) Churchman’s approach can
be criticized for its ‘subjectivism’ and its ‘idealism’, but

he acknowledges its influence on ‘the interpretive system
approach and the emergence of emancipatory systems
thinking’ through (i) its understanding of objectivity, (ii) its
emphasis on ‘whole systems’ improvement in terms of the
‘true’ clients, and (iii) its deep moral commitment (pp 224–
225). Ulrich, who worked for some time with Churchman,
has attempted to achieve the same ends as Churchman, but
in his approach the principle of ‘sweeping in’ is replaced by
the discursive process of ‘boundary critique’ as the core
methodological concept (Ulrich, 2004).
Ackoff was more successful than Churchman in turning
his action-orientated philosophizing based on Singerian
pragmatism into practical methods that could be applied
by practitioners. He argued that objectivity through model-
ling was impossible; objectivity can only be approached by
groups of individuals with diverse values. His approach
‘interactive planning’ involves gaining the participation of
stakeholders in the design of desirable futures and bringing
them about. His work has had a major impact on the OR
and systems communities, particularly in the UK.
Jackson (2000) observes that Ackoff’s approach has also
been criticized for its ‘subjectivism’ and its ‘idealism’.
Further, he says that Ackoff is accused of not giving serious
attention to deep-seated conflict and coercion and of relying
too much on participation as a remedy for organizational
problems. He is also accused of artificially limiting the scope
of his projects so as not to challenge his client’s or sponsors
fundamental interests. Ackoff believes his critics are
obsessed with the notion of irresolvable conflicts. He points
out that he has not encountered such conflicts in more than
300 projects (pp 243–246).
Future potential
Pragmatism itself is now largely ignored by the OR
Academic Community. When it is mentioned it is usually
rejected. For instance, Jackson (1999) believes that practice
should be under the guidance of (controlled by) theory and
therefore opposes any descent (as he would see it) into
pragmatism which expects theory to serve practice. Mingers
(2000) argues that in the OR/MS context there are three
main problems with instrumentalism: (i) it does not provide
information about why a particular theory or model does or
does not work, (ii) it does not contribute towards an
understanding of the way in which things work since it does
not claim to generate explanations, and (iii) it also only
provides a relatively ineffective criterion of truth. Despite his
rejection of pragmatism in general and of instrumentalism in
particular, Mingers says: ‘Clearly, this view [pragmatism] is
very compatible with the practical ends-orientated nature of
OR and has been implicitly suggested by Raitt (1979), ‘We
do not ask if it is true, only if it works—we validate not
verify’ (p 835) and Dando et al (1977) ‘The overall aim y is
to contrive devices by which y the system can, in some
sense, be supposed to work better’ (p 90).’
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 905
Immediately prior to the quote above Raitt (1979) writes:
‘The distinctive feature of OR in my view is its use of models
and analogies. A model is not a theory, it has no direct
substantive implications. No-one expects the history of OR
to show an accumulation of models of increasing power,
precision or generality. A model is constructed for practical
application in a particular situation. It is wholly instru-
mental.’
It seems that many believe OR is or ought to be practical
and instrumental. It is also my experience that good OR
practitioners both aspire to be, and are in practice,
pragmatic. There are a number of reasons for thinking that
pragmatism could serve OR practitioners well, including:
(1) Pragmatism fits what we do, how practitioners behave in
practice: In the early days of the Metaphysical Club
Green urged that the membership look to ‘the practical
significance of every proposition’, a view which he
appears to have derived from Alexander Bain’s (1818–
1903) definition of belief—‘of that upon which a man is
prepared to act’. Green and then Holmes saw that
Bain’s ideas articulated the viewpoint of practical
lawyers (Kuklick, 2003). The same can be said of
OR practitioners. In practice most OR consultants
resolve issues by comparing the outcomes that would
result from different courses of action in a particular
context rather than appealing to a generalized set of
abstract principles. They also find it helpful to
concentrate on outcomes when trying to obtain
consensus to a course of action: although a diverse
set of people can seldom agree on a set of principles,
they can often agree on a course of action because each
person considers the outcomes are desirable from their
own perspective.
(2) Pragmatism supports an empirical (in other words
scientific) approach: Most OR practitioners would be
reluctant to give up a basically scientific approach to
their activity. Dewey has shown how this scientific
orientation can be taken beyond the establishment of
facts; it can be applied to the full range of human
activities such as education, organizational design,
politics and international affairs.
(3) Pragmatism emphasizes the uncertainty and changing
nature of our findings: It views science as fallible and
dependent on context, a view that has resonance with
the experience of practitioners working in the field. We
have all had to accept that the science we learnt at
school and college is not as definitive as we thought.
The pragmatist view that science is fallible, changing
and subject to social context accords with the views of
many philosophers of science (from Kuhn onwards).
OR practitioners adopt the methods of natural and
social science to develop local, context-dependent
science that is not easily transferable either from one
context to another or from one time to another in the
906 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
same context. Pragmatism also suggests that in the
absence of a logically watertight argument, the weight
of evidence can be used to judge whether to adopt a
certain belief as true. It would advocate testing such an
uncertain truth experimentally. Thus, policy actions
(the outcomes of which are seldom certain) are
experiments.
(4) Pragmatism recognizes the individual psychological
nature of meaning: James in particular developed the
idea that meaning is personal. Pragmatism is an
account of the way people think, the way they come
up with ideas, form beliefs, and reach decisions. No
belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence
with reality, because mirroring reality is not the
purpose of having minds. In his first article as a
professional psychologist, ‘Remarks on Spencer’s
definition of mind as correspondence’ in the Journal
of Speculative Philosophy (1878) he wrote, ‘The knower
is an actor, and coefficient of the truth. y Mental
interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are
bases for human action—action which to a great extent
transforms the world—help to make the truth which
they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind,
from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the
game.’ The use of soft methods could find support in
these ideas.
(5) Pragmatism holds that inquiry is social, as is knowledge:
Retaining, maintaining and updating knowledge is a
collective exercise. The process of questioning, experi-
mentation and data gathering will converge on a
consensus. For Peirce this meant engaging the scientific
community, for James it meant a wider group of
erudite individuals, while for Dewey it meant the whole
community. The method of pragmatism would drive
out incorrect and immoral views. The ideas of
pragmatism in general and of Dewey (1937) in
particular provided one of the two streams of thought
(the other being Chicago sociology) that contributed to
the development of the grounded theory approach to
qualitative analysis by Glaser and Strauss (Strauss,
1987).
(6) Pragmatism supports a theory of learning based on
experience, experimentation and action: Dewey suggests
less use of lecturing and more of participation and
activity for educational purposes. Quite apart from the
implications for the education system in general,
lecturers in OR can find support for participatory
exercises and projects within their courses. Practitioners
are encouraged to build participation and experimenta-
tion into their interventions.
(7) Pragmatism addresses morality, social interests and
politics: The advocates of emancipatory and critical
thinking within OR criticize other approaches for
failing to engage with issues of conflict and power:
they say they lack a theory of interests and society.
Pragmatism is not silent on such issues. Dewey gives a
naturalistic account: ‘to show how in modern societies
the requirements of morality support, and in turn are
bolstered by, a determinate, although not fixed, notion
of human well-being’ (Festenstein, 1997, p 187). His
approach is ‘capable of explaining why people with
their particular interests and commitments would have
a central interest in communicative relations, and why
that is a morally significant fact’ (Festenstein, 1997,
p 186). Pragmatism invokes the cannons and norms of
rationality of a particular society (a consensus whose
values and traditions constitute the framework for a
thought and define the conditions in which it can be
validated), cannons and norms that are not fixed but
are subject to change. Dewey seeks to ground a
grassroots conception of liberal and democratic poli-
tics. This recognizes a plurality of values but accepts its
own partiality: that its beliefs and values are historically
conditioned, fallible and open to revision (Festenstein,
1997). The views of Habermas, Putman and Rorty have
evolved from those of Dewey; between them they
provide a number of different ways of conceptualizing
these issues which could have a bearing on the choice
and conduct of an OR intervention.
(8) Pragmatism places theory in the service of practice:
Given their commitment to the development of theory,
some academics, particularly those seeking to develop
new ways of thinking about the conduct of OR, may
find this hard to accept. However, for many others it
is difficult to see how the development of better
algorithms or problem-solving methods has some
higher purpose other than aiding practice in appro-
priate circumstances. It is true that there is a strand of
anti-intellectualism in pragmatism: it argues against the
adoption of abstract principles as ends, preferring to
examine the outcomes of means in a particular context.
However, pragmatism is not against theory, it simply
gives it a different, less exalted role. According to
pragmatism theory should come out of a requirement
of practice/action.
(9) Many OR approaches can find support in the philosophy:
For instance, risk analysis finds support in the
pragmatic emphasis on outcomes, participative ap-
proaches are in accord with Dewey’s theories on
education as a group activity learning from experience
and it is possible that cognitive mapping could find
support in James’s individual psychological approach.
Pragmatism would see in multi criteria decision making
(MCDM) a way of ensuring that emphasis is placed on
outcomes and consequences, on means as well as ends.
Mathematical programmes are logic machines. Simula-
tion is experimentation. Systems dynamics allows the
‘whole system’ to be modelled. Probability theory and
statistics allow statements to be made about the
fallibility of our forecasts and predictions.

(10) Pragmatism’s stance on many things seems surprisingly
modern: The recognition of science as a social activity
anticipates the debates about the social nature of
science brought to fore by Kuhn and Bruno Latour and
others. Peirce’s development of semiotics is also a
forerunner of the 20th-century interest in language. He
would have found the twists and turns of literary
criticism a natural extension of his interests. James’s
approach has much in common with the existentialism
of Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Boer-
sema also finds strong links between the ideas of Sartre
and Peirce on the nature of consciousness (Boersema,
2003)
(11) Pragmatism’s biological approach should stand it in good
stead to adapt to new science: There is tremendous
amount of rethinking going on as a result of research
into the mind, consciousness, evolution and genetics.
James’s wish that psychology should be treated like a
natural science is at last being realized. The mind
sciences are the province of evolutionary biologists,
cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychophysicists,
linguists, computer scientists and so on (Gazziniga,
1998). BF Skinner’s theories of stimulus and response
have yielded to Noam Chomsky’s contention that
language is a biologically in-built human capability.
Steven Pinker has extended the argument suggesting
that language is a human instinct. Through genetics we
are beginning to understand some of the mechanisms of
the mind. Pinker in The Blank State (Pinker, 2002)
describes how controversy has developed: EO Wilson in
his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson,
1975), suggested that the new scientific understanding
could change the way we think and talk about social
policies; the responses by Stephen Jay Gould and others
in Allen et al (1975) have reverberated through the
academic world and the controversy continues to this
day (Wilson, 1998; Gould, 2003). This is an exciting
battle of ideas at the frontier of intellectual endeavour.
The results will change how we think, how we behave
and how we conduct our affairs.
(12) Pragmatism is flexible enough to accommodate other
philosophical positions: James says this about pragma-
tism: ‘But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no
particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines
save its methods. As the young Italian pragmatist
Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories,
like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open
out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic
volume; in the next someone on his knees, praying for
faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a
body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic
metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the
corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a
practicable way of getting into or out of their respective
rooms’ (James, 1907, p 29). Pragmatism could thus
R Ormerod—History and ideas of pragmatism 907
provide the meta-methodology required, according to
Jackson (2000), ‘to take maximum advantage of the
benefits to be gained from using methodologies
premised upon alternative paradigms’ (p 387).
A word of caution is necessary. However appealing the
attributes described above might be to the OR practitioner,
it does not follow that the underlying philosophical
propositions of pragmatism are true, or are the best way
of understanding humanity in the world, or are even
defensible. Such reassuring certainty is not accessible to the
philosophically naı̈ve (you and me) nor offered by the
philosophical cognoscenti (renowned philosophers). This is,
of course, true of all other philosophies. The only way we, as
practitioners, can judge the various philosophical positions is
in practice: do they make sense to us, what effect would
adopting them be likely to have, are they useful? These
are, of course, pragmatic questions and it could be argued
that using pragmatism to judge pragmatism is a circular
argument. However, other philosophies are in the even more
uncomfortable position of necessarily being judged by us in
terms of a philosophy, pragmatism, which they reject. We
have no choice in this so long as we are in practice
pragmatists in the habit of judging things according to their
likely impact in our particular context at this particular time.
The saving grace is pragmatism’s willingness to accommo-
date other positions.
Conclusions
Pragmatism arose in the USA in the second half of the
19th century, a time of religious, economic and intellectual
turmoil. It was based on the way that people, professional
people in particular, behaved in practice. At a time when
an alternative to the explanation of divine creation was
offered by the ideas of Darwin, consciousness, memory,
knowledge, reasoning and language were all seen as man’s
evolutionary response to his environment. According to
pragmatism, beliefs develop over generations to guide
action. These beliefs were developed collectively through
experience with only the fittest surviving. Truths were held
because they worked at that time in that context. Theories
developed out of the need to shape, simplify and make
memorable the multitude of contingent facts that action
threw up. Theory supports practice. Knowledge is fallible.
New facts need to be accommodated in the existing body of
knowledge. If current theories are contradicted a new
explanation needs to be found. Beliefs, that is theories one
is prepared to act on, need not be absolutely, logically
certain; they can be adopted on the weight of evidence.
Experience will tell.
It is the impact on outcomes that determines whether
theories have meaning and what that meaning is. Beliefs can
only be judged in terms of the outcomes of the actions they
engender. All actions are experiments. Educational practices,
908 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 8
governmental policies, institutional arrangements and inter-
national interventions are all experiments and should be
judged by their outcomes. Morality lies in outcomes rather
than principles. Therefore, it is the means that should be
considered rather than ends. Whereas ends can be debated
purely rationally, means always have a factual content.
Therefore political questions are subject to scientific analysis
(to establish the facts of the matter).
OR is a professional activity rooted in practice. It looks to
theories to support this practice. It is a scientific approach
applied locally. Its findings are time and context dependent.
The questions addressed are related to the practical
requirements of decision making at a particular time in a
particular context. The theories developed need to be
established sufficiently to support specific organizational
decisions and no more. Operational or policy options are
developed and their potential outcomes are compared. If OR
wants a philosophical approach to inform its thinking about
its practice, pragmatism would seem to have much to offer.
Particularly appealing are the first and last points in the list
in the previous section: it fits what we do, how practitioners
behave in practice, and it is flexible enough to accommodate
other philosophical positions. The latter point suggests it
could play the role of an overarching philosophy for OR
(Ormerod, 2002), used to evaluate the alternatives (Check-
land’s phenomenolgy, Jackson’s critical theory, Taket and
White’s postmodernism, Mingers’s critical realism and so
on) in terms of their practical outcomes. This seems to me to
be important. As new philosophies come and go we need a
stable perspective to hang on to. The method of pragmatism
could provide such a perspective.
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Received June 2004;
accepted July 2005 after two revisions