As its most basic mission, pragmatism sets out to determine an idea’s merit by examining its practical consequences, rather than through purely abstract evaluation. As a result of this emphasis on an idea’s effectiveness, the complex ways in which pragmatists conceive of abstract notions such as truth and self-concept are often overlooked. Close examination of the works of two pragmatist thinke...

Qualitative research is often associated with interpretivism, but alternatives do exist. Besides critical research and sometimes positivism, qualitative research in information systems can be performed following a paradigm of pragmatism. This paradigm is associated with action, intervention and constructive knowledge. This paper has picked out interpretivism and pragmatism as two possible and i...

In 1908, the Third International Congress of Philosophy convened in Heidelberg, Germany. According to the editors of Pragmatism and Education, this event witnessed a rejection of pragmatic ideas in Germany which would hold throughout most of the twentieth Century. In the wake of the American revival of pragmatism, the intellectual landscape in Germany has changed, enough so to invite a reconsid...

IN “The Aims and Tasks of General Semantics: Implications of the Time-Binding Theory,” S. I. Hayakawa (1906–1992) distinguishes between three orientations—prescientific, antiscientific, and scientific—and what implication each orientation holds for the prospect of human agreement (1951 & 2001). Similar themes that Hayakawa’s article addresses can be found in an essay written more than six decad...

The article offers an overview of the main approaches to the media and introduces the reader to the most influential media theories. It deals with the historical development of the relationship of media, culture, society, and the public. It traces the development of different notions of culture, their impacts on the media, and their relationships to various conceptions of “the public”. It draws...

Purpose – To show that the neo-pragmatist position of Richard Rorty, when combined with a sociocultural perspective, provides library and information science (LIS) with a forceful epistemological tool. Design/methodology/approach – Literature-based conceptual analysis of: historical development of pragmatism in relation to other epistemological positions; neo-pragmatism as a non-dualist, both p...

This paper represents the first installment of a larger project devoted to the relevance of pragmatism for bioethics. One self-consciously pragmatist move would be to return to the classical pragmatist canon of Peirce, James and Dewey in search of substantive doctrines or methodological approaches that might be applied to current bioethical controversies. Another pragmatist (or neopragmatist) m...

Introduction I am never entirely sure what those who call themselves pragmatists or who declare an affi nity with pragmatism actually believe in. Pragmatists would probably respond that this is the wrong question, as what matters is not what they believe in but what they do with their beliefs—or, to be more precise, what follows from their beliefs. Aft er all, one of the founding insights of pr...