Difference between revisions of "Pragmatism"

==Overview==

Pragmatism is a branch of ethical philosophy focused on deliberation and testing, using observation and realistic modes of action to determine ethics. There are three dominant authors in this field of ethics--John Dewey, C.S. Pierce, and William James. Deweyan pragmatism is by far the most common in LD. This framework is particularly strategic because unlike most ethical theories, it is not answering the question of what is ethical, but rather asking how we determine what is ethical, which means most frameworks do not disprove pragmatism.

==Deweyan Pragmatism==

The Deweyan version of pragmatism equates roughly to the idea of pluralism, or deliberative democracy. It prioritizes the ability to listen to voices and deliberate over the best mode of ethics. The framework supports actions that are consistent with the voicing and discovery of new ideas. We can look at a few examples to show how this framework operates:

The framework then gives several reasons to prefer it, which won't be as in depth in this page, but tldr: (1) philosophy inevitably has limits--only pragmatism can revise those limits through deliberating over new ideas that weren't previously thought of (2) pragmatism is NOT an ideal theory that ignores oppression, but starts from the assumption that the world is imperfect and that violence exists, and to stop it, we should revise systems of domination like capitalism and patriarchy to make people's voices heard (3) violence takes place in social forms, so we should use our experiences as a way to motivate ourselves and others not to oppress people and use it as a method of education--the world is constantly changing as we learn new things so we cannot create a stable conception of ethics, but must use experiences to revise it for the better

==Piercean Pragmatism==

Less common in LD, Piercean pragmatism, often dubbed 'scientific pragmatism,' focuses less on deliberation and more on experimentation. As the Pierce evidence in the first affirmative was discussing, Pierce believes that ethics is a question of using what we learned in the past and applying it to the future. The same way the things we learn in kindergarten about basic addition are then applied to real life word problems in middle school, we learn different conceptions of ethics through observation (e.g. values like respect, honesty, and trustworthiness in school) and apply them to the specific moral situations we face in real life.A few examples:

7. Experience necessitates deliberative democracy because (1) we combine the observations and experiences of people and (b) it allows for flexibility since we can change ethics as we learn new ideas under deliberative democracy, the same way our observations constantly change how we view our experiences (back then we thought Earth was flat--we did some experiments--we learned it's not)

==Readings==

For copyright purposes, I won't post the pdfs here but all of the articles are cited as cards in the examples. I would suggest reading Pierce, Serra, and Glaude from the Deweyan pragmatism aff example and Lekan from the second example.

Some debaters on Circuit Debater who read pragmatism include Hunter NP, Cypress Woods AZ, and Greenhill (2016)

==Examples==