Pragmatism
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Philosophy
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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 interactions. It says a sufficiently detailed framework of rules and algorithms is sufficient to address any contingency that might arise. Furthermore it endeavours to explain heuristics and and pragmatic responses as being reducible to, or a function of, a set of immutable underlying rules.
To a formalist, any failure of its program to manage contingencies comes down to an insufficiently detailed model of the world.
Richard Dawkins famously suggested that when catching a ball we perform in our brain the equivalent of differential equations. Well, “functionally equivalent” only in the trite sense that they arrive at the same result — if they didn’t one of the models would fail on its own terms (it didn't catch the ball) not because it failed to to the job of the differential equation. The differential equation is not better, or more accurate, or truer than the gaze heuristic. Neither has “epistemic priority” over the other.
The pragmatist would say, to the contrary, that any form of articulated rules are a post-hoc generalisation, that tends not to work in practice, except in tightly constrained circumstances: the rules are to lived experience as 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, 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.
Liberalism and pluralism
The implication of a modernist disposition is that there is a single true description of the universe, and that one is justified in suppressing any description which is at variance with that, purely on grounds of efficiency. This is at heart an illiberal disposition.
There are, of course, cognitive dissonances: the inductive nature of scientific reasoning means one can never have certainty about any scientific hypothesis, and and the the nature of time I'm means one can never have complete information. Both of these things (certainty and completeness of data) are pre conditions to the modernist end goal of a perfectly solved universe. So modernism must acknowledge that it is is at best and aspiration.
Furthermore the scientific method has yielded theorems which are decidedly pragmatic in their bearing. In particular, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. This is an algorithm which proceeds by reference only to available information at hand and by reference to practical fitness in the given circumstance. It requires no no god's eye view or overarching theoretical principle to work. Yet some of the strongest proponents of elusion are highly modernistic in their outlook.