Pragmatism

In other words, the criterion of truth is reduced absolutely to the immediate validity of the application... Percy Bridgman's elaboration of Operationalism, the development of Pragmatism which says that a concept is not meaningful unless it can be reduced to a sequence of human actions. http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#pragmatism

http://www.pragmatism.org

John Dewey involvement The pragmatists were caught between two different philosophical movements and were equally critical of both. On the one hand, they were reacting against nineteenth century idealist Philosophy, which often got hung up in metaphysical disputes that had no possibility of being resolved. But on the other hand, they were equally critical of the positivist's belief that it was possible to not do metaphysics.

John Dewey's Version of Pragmatism which he called "Instrumentalism" needs to be distinguished from the pragmatism of Charles S Peirce and William James, as well as the Instrumentalism of the Logical Positivist-s. From Hegel Dewey inherited the idea of thought as both the mediation of "raw" sensation through categories and concepts, and the idea that such mediation does not signal a movement away from reality, but towards a more adequate grasp of it.

British Empiricism - [see](http://peace.saumag.edu/faculty/Kardas/Courses/HP/Lectures/C5%20EmpSensPos/Brit Emp.html) section "Types of Empiricism"

Critical Pragmatism: A Rough Draft http://asterix.ednet.lsu.edu/~maxcy/cp.html Extending from the 19th Century work of Charles S Peirce, through the writings of William James, John Dewey,and George Herbert Mead, to contemporary thinkers like Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Cornel West... What is involved is a "practical intersubjectivity" wherein the only significant criterion for identity in meaning is in the agreement in action, as Biestra (1994) tells us. This is to say that what we mean by collaboration, joint tenantcy, or partnership is what the outcome may mean in social action: "...understanding is basically a practical matter..." (Context, Team Is The Focus)

History of Epistemology http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/history.htm It is during this period that Pragmatism appears, via the American logician Charles S Peirce and later the mystic William James. Pragmatism comes on to the scene as a tendency towards Irrationalism: "What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle." (William James, What Pragmatism Means, 1906) Now there is, in this rejection of the concept of theoretical truth, the insistence upon practice as the critierion of truth which is undoubtedly progressive and rational, but this emerges only later, in the Operationalism of Percy Bridgman. In a sense pragmatism shares the conception of practice as the criterion of truth with Hegel: for Hegel, practice is only the criterion of truth, for pragmatism, practice is the only criterion of truth.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/pragmatism.html

William James' Pragmatism is a free EBook

This all seems related to the Experiment-based approach of Natural Philosophy...