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Constructing Pragmatist Knowledge reintroduces an explicit and systematic philosophical approach to education through American Pragmatism, expanding and detailing the practice of pragmatism itself for practitioners across various fields of social action. While a number of theorists are referenced, it focuses on the work of the original pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Jane Addams. It is written in a narrative style and connects personal and professional experience of the author with philosophical description, analysis and explanation. Major themes of pragmatism are encountered throughout involving knowledge, experience, inquiry, social acts, dialectic and contradiction, giving rise to human constructs of values, moral conduct and bricolage. Reintroducing pragmatism and epistemology as the focus of teaching and learning heralds revolutionary and democratic change for education systems worldwide and corrects neoliberal tendencies that impose anti-educational ideological, economic and political distortions. This book will be of interest to academics, graduate students, teachers and pre-service teachers, policy makers and researchers in education, philosophy, sociology and epistemology.
Constructing Pragmatist Knowledge reintroduces an explicit and systematic philosophical approach to education through American Pragmatism, expanding and detailing the practice of pragmatism itself for practitioners across various fields of social action. While a number of theorists are referenced, it focuses on the work of the original pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Jane Addams. It is written in a narrative style and connects personal and professional experience of the author with philosophical description, analysis and explanation. Major themes of pragmatism are encountered throughout involving knowledge, experience, inquiry, social acts, dialectic and contradiction, giving rise to human constructs of values, moral conduct and bricolage. Reintroducing pragmatism and epistemology as the focus of teaching and learning heralds revolutionary and democratic change for education systems worldwide and corrects neoliberal tendencies that impose anti-educational ideological, economic and political distortions. This book will be of interest to academics, graduate students, teachers and pre-service teachers, policy makers and researchers in education, philosophy, sociology and epistemology.
Argues for a transactionally situated approach to science and medicine in order to meet the needs of marginalized groups. The Limits of Knowledge provides an understanding of what pragmatist feminist theories look like in practice, combining insights from the work of American pragmatist John Dewey concerning experimental inquiry and transaction with arguments for situated knowledge rooted in contemporary feminism. Using case studies to demonstrate some of the particular ways that dominant scientific and medical practices fail to meet the health needs of marginalized groups and communities, Nancy Arden McHugh shows how transactionally situated approaches are better able to meet the needs of these communities. Examples include a community action group fighting environmental injustice in Bayview Hunters Point, California, one of the most toxic communities in the US; gender, race, age, and class biases in the study and diagnosis of endometriosis; a critique of Evidence-Based Medicine; the current effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese women and children; and pediatric treatment of Amish and Mennonite children.
Focusing on research designs for projects that collect both qualitative and quantitative data, this practical book discusses strategies for bringing qualitative and quantitative methods together so that their combined strengths accomplish more than is possible with a single method. The approach is broadly interdisciplinary, reflecting the interest in mixed methods research of social scientists from anthropology, communication, criminal justice, education, evaluation, nursing, organizational behavior, psychology, political science, public administration, public health, sociology, social work, and urban studies. In contrast to an "anything goes" approach or a naïve hope that "two methods are better than one," the author argues that projects using mixed methods must pay even more attention to research design than single method approaches. The book’s practical emphasis on mixed methods makes it useful both to active researchers and to students who intend to pursue such a career.
Pragmatism: An Introduction provides an account of the arguments of the central figures of the most important philosophical tradition in the American history of ideas, pragmatism. This wide-ranging and accessible study explores the work of the classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, as well as more recent philosophers including Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Cheryl Misak, and Robert B. Brandom. Michael Bacon examines how pragmatists argue for the importance of connecting philosophy to practice. In so doing, they set themselves in opposition to many of the presumptions that have dominated philosophy since Descartes. The book demonstrates how pragmatists reject the Cartesian spectator theory of knowledge, in which the mind is viewed as seeking accurately to represent items in the world, and replace it with an understanding of truth and knowledge in terms of the roles they play within our social practices. The book explores the diverse range of positions that have engendered marked and sometimes acrimonious disputes amongst pragmatists. Bacon identifies the themes underlying these differences, revealing a greater commonality than many commentators have recognized. The result is an illuminating narrative of a rich philosophical movement that will be of interest to students in philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas.
Many contemporary constructivists are particularly attuned to Dewey's penetrating criticism of traditional epistemology, which offers rich alternatives for understanding processes of learning and education, knowledge and truth, and experience and culture. This book, the result of cooperation between the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the Dewey Center at the University of Cologne, provides an excellent example of the international character of pragmatist studies against the backdrop of constructivist concerns. As a part of their exploration of the many points of contact between classical pragmatism and contemporary constructivism, its contributors turn their attention to theories of interaction and transaction, communication and culture, learning and education, community and democracy, theory and practice, and inquiry and methods. Part One is a basic survey of Dewey's pragmatism and its implications for contemporary constructivism. Part Two examines the implications of the connections between Deweyan pragmatism and contemporary constructivism. Part Three presents a lively exchange among the contributors, as they challenge one another and defend their positions and perspectives. As they seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points in ways that are designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. This concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism.
Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more (Peirce) and less (James) objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James's theory, and that pragmatism has never fully recovered. An alternative, and underappreciated, story is told here. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid-1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with that position, Ramsey would not have like what he saw.
This book aims to make the pragmatist intellectual framework accessible to organization and management scholars. It presents some fundamental concepts of Pragmatism, their potential application to the study of organizations and the resulting theoretical, methodological, and practical issues.
This open access book provides a broad context for the understanding of current problems of science and of the different movements aiming to improve the societal impact of science and research. The author offers insights with regard to ideas, old and new, about science, and their historical origins in philosophy and sociology of science, which is of interest to a broad readership. The book shows that scientifically grounded knowledge is required and helpful in understanding intellectual and political positions in various discussions on the grand challenges of our time and how science makes impact on society. The book reveals why interventions that look good or even obvious, are often met with resistance and are hard to realize in practice. Based on a thorough analysis, as well as personal experiences in aids research, university administration and as a science observer, the author provides - while being totally open regarding science's limitations- a realistic narrative about how research is conducted, and how reliable ‘objective’ knowledge is produced. His idea of science, which draws heavily on American pragmatism, fits in with the global Open Science movement. It is argued that Open Science is a truly and historically unique movement in that it translates the analysis of the problems of science into major institutional actions of system change in order to improve academic culture and the impact of science, engaging all actors in the field of science and academia.
This book addresses the rift between major philosophical factions in the United States, which the author describes as a "philosophically becalmed" three-legged creature made up of analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and pragmatism. Joseph Margolis offers a modified pragmatism as the best way out of this stalemate. Whether he is examining Heidegger or rethinking the foibles of Dewey, Rorty, and Peirce, much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophy comes into play as Margolis presents his history of philosophy's evolution and defends his views. He does not, however, mean for philosophy to turn to the pragmatism of yore or even to its revival in the 1970s. Rather, he finds in recent approaches to pragmatism a middle ground between analytic philosophy's scientism (and its disinterest in analyzing human nature)and continental philosophy's reliance on attributing transcendental powers to mere mortals.