The Pros And Cons Of Pragmatism

Pragmatism offers us a way to evaluate our beliefs and find truths in a practical manner. This makes it of more worth than other epistemological philosophies which are often concerned more with knowledge, or the idea of knowledge. Pragmatism provides us with a way to truth through evaluation of beliefs and ideas. This done by taking an idea or belief and evaluating the effect it would have on your actions if you continued, or discontinued that belief. You can evaluate both scientific and personal ideas in this manner. If the idea or belief produce a positive result, then it is a truth. For example, I hold the belief that there is an immortal soul that is affected by our personal actions. This belief leads me to want to try to help people, …show more content…
Through looking at our beliefs we can determine if they true ideas or not. If they provide us with valuable and positive consequences. While also fitting in with our worldview. In this way it 's superior to the other philosophical epistemologies because it can give us truth and knowledge, without it having to fit within a rigid structure, but also allowing for objective truths as well. There are still problems with the theory. One being that it can be easily just become another form of relativism. It can also be argued that many different psychological factors can lead a person to holding a belief, and that through pragmatism it can be justified. It could also be said that the Pragmatic theory itself is contradictory as some beliefs must correspond to a reality, thus causing it to validate the Correspondence Theory of Truth which was criticized by the early pragmatist. It was also not addressed that it we can never say an idea is true or false, because we cannot know all of the possible long term consequences of a belief. While I have showed strengths of pragmatism, I was not able to show it in a complete light or address all of its