Pragmatism

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A philosophical disposition closely associated with William Dewey and Richard Rorty which more or less does what it says on the tin. Rather than getting too hung up on on ontology or epistemological status, keep an open mind, don’t be a dick, and treat situations on their merits as they appear to you. Prefer heuristics over algorithms.

To be contrasted with modernism, determinism, formalism, rationalism, all of which see the universe as a thing to be solved, explained, governed by a set of unitary consistent axioms, and any perceived tractability a function of human frailty.

The formalist view prioritises formal structure over individual interaction and says that a sufficiently detailed framework of rules and algorithms is sufficient to to address any contingency that might arise. Furthermore it endeavours to explain nqs sticks and and practical responses to problems as a function of a set of immutable underlying rules which simply have not yet been discovered.

To the formalists way of thinking, any failure to to manage contingencies is a function of an insufficiently detailed model of the world. For example, Richard Dawkins famously suggested that to catch a ball and athlete performs the equivalent of differential equations.

The pragmatist would say to the contrary that any form of articulated rules are in fact a post-hoc generalisation, that tends not to work in practice, except in tightly constrained circumstances: the rules are too experienced has a map is to a territory.

This is about as profound a split as one can have in a theory of the world.

In linguistics it is to prefer construed meaning over text comma meaning being a dynamic interaction of text with the the the cognitive tools and cultural experience of the interpreter. This is necessarily a much less certain and more complex exercise than the “objective” parsing of a sentence, but it yields a much greater, and richer, canvas of meaning. Primacy goes not to the words themselves but how they are interpreted. The cost of this step is the sacrifice of linguistic certainty. We can not be certain that the meaning we intended to convey in a sentence we utter will be understood as we mean it to be understood. Nor does our intention have have the receivers interpretation. In fact, the contrary.

Likewise a firm’s formal organisation does not have priority over the informal networks that exist in the firm and by which things get done.