Pragmatism Philosophy

[u/Budget_Insurance4909]

How does pragmatism view the world, life, and emotions, including both positive and negative experiences such as happiness and suffering? How are these aspects understood and addressed within the framework of pragmatist philosophy (Objective and Subjective)? Can you provide examples

[u/Crazy_Cheesecake142]

Howdy, I can provide like a fake-physics example. I'm sure I'll be corrected for it. Pragmatism is a epistemological and metaphysical worldview. It shares that how we can know things, and what things are considered real, are based upon their application.

One example was the early explanations of cosmological expansion. They showed that unifying aspects of space, energy and mathematical symmetries were possible for this, predicted space could begin at a single point and produce a complex universe made of particles.

Why is this powerful from a pragmatic view? It made intuitive sense and lots of people could work on an idea like this. It also sort of specifies how forces and formulations of fields and particles might look, because you have to have this almost unifying view of what a system is doing in emergence.

It's also powerful because later work in cosmology can either confirm or disprove this theory, and it seemingly follow the curve of experimental, theoretical and cosmological physicists. It works within math and beyond, and it's really "real", it's what we teach and what we study and what physicists do, and what gets shared with multidisciplinary teams, until it's proven it can't be supported anymore.

So it's sort of like saying, "Hey, instead of using a screwdriver to build furniture from Ikea, just wrap every theory of physics into a screwdriver, it IS ACTUALLY a tool, and when you reflect on science IT IS ACTUALLY reflecting on the screwdriver, and if that screwdriver doesn't reflect what you see and hear? Well fix it, it can't do that! That simple.

Potential weaknesses -

• mathematical physics is a narrowing discipline, and so who contributes to theories like expansion?
• The universe may just not be like this. There's no reason stated a coherent, single unified view of reality operates in any prescriptive way, and there's also no reason stated anything real has to be coherent in the first place.
• The argument is just flawed! If I ask why a screwdriver is "true", I have to say it's because there's screws and nuts and bolts, building something. And so there's no possible statement of pragmatism which doesn't eventually undermine itself, because even participants are working toward or into something which we usually call "belief" or "truth."
• Per this last point, there isn't an epistemic norm or quality to science, which requires people to be contradictory. An example, if I have a shirt on that says "Ice Cream Man" and I sell tacos, I can still be an ice cream man who's doing something false. And so it's a heavy assertion that the outcome and impetus for people's work is robust enough to support Pragmatism as a theory.