COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Pragmatism
10 Feb 2020
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At pragmatism: pragmatism"s ardent rejection of any form of dogmatism is in itself dogmatism and thus pragmatism undermines itself. Pragmatism regards truth to be something useful to us, but that idea of truth is already a definition that relies on its correspondence to reality not on its usefulness: pragmatism is un-pragmatic. A) it can"t solve problems because we don"t really know what is useful to us. B) there will never be agreement on certain things as true because each people views different things as having different usefulness. This means that no truth can be widely expressed and so its belief can"t have beneficial effects. C) it prevents any adaptation or innovation because we will never change our beliefs in light of new evidence that indicates which beliefs correspond with reality, but simply ignore evidence which contradicts useful beliefs. But this means that things like technological innovation are unlikely.
