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Knowledge, Learning, and Pragmatism: Reversal of Platonic Certitude of Ideas



Picture's Courtesy: Google Books

I have heard people saying 'be practical'. I often think about this advice and find many puzzling answers: what is practical?

Practicality may be a principle that emphasizes the importance of practice rather than having merely a 'museum of ideas'. The ownership over ideas without practice is as useful as forgetting the art of archery when the enemy is ready to blow the existence, something akin to Karna story in Mahabharata. The question of significance is if practicality can have life without the ideas or ideals? Practicality is, in fact, dependent upon some ideals, which make it practical in the first place. In that sense, the dichotomy of idealism and pragmatism is to be revised in terms of their differences as conceptual categories. 

In American school of thought, Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey developed the thesis of Pragmatism which has gained its popularity in Rorty age (Richard Rorty, one of the last defenders of Pragmatism made it an epochal transformation with his expositions through literary adventures). 

The ancient example of pragmatism could be found in Buddha who neglected many metaphysical questions and focused on the question to liberate humankind from the living reality of dukha (suffering). He raised the practical problems like a person suffering from thirst doesn't contemplate the nature of water rather chooses an existential act to quench the thirst. A person on death bed doesn't value any possession or ownership rather opts to pass away with less pain and suffering. 

Our knowledge is just a culmination of demands and exigencies from which our world passes through. All the conceptual creation doesn't emanate out of nothing. It has grounding in a situation or puzzle which requires an effective solution. All the major discoveries and inventions happened in the world to address some questions or problems. Knowledge has a constitutive element which reflects the creativity of human species as an agent exposed to facticity and desires transcendence (Jean Paul Sartre). It is not just a spectator's approach to observe and discover the law of nature as believed by many metaphysians. Rather humans have got the creative skills from nature to create knowledge under a particular condition or situation in which the personal preferences and biasness remain in the hypothesis one creates and tests through induction of experiences.  

Knowledge and learning for human species are not merely a fancy urge rather these are the existential necessities to foster the values in newcomers and perpetuate the 'will to life' (Arthur Schopenhauer). John Dewey in his Democracy and Education demonstrated the urge of education as a progressive process to instill values in children, so that the culture in which the adult is grown and progressed could be transmitted to a younger one. Education, in that sense, has a pragmatic potential to perpetuate human culture and their institutions in new forms, even though the finite reality is the fact of an individual life.

Pragmatism revises the idea of truth, since the history of the idea has exposed its fallibility and restricts the scope of knowledge to verification and satisfaction of the agent, who is inquiring about the problem. No one can claim its historical standing and spatial validity. The nature of science, though stands on cooperative research and institutionalisation of critical method, cannot provide the indubitable proposition in the Cartesian sense. At least, the history of ideas exposes the harsh reality of this. But science as a particular method has definitely outsmarted the other methods of inquiry, hence its method is often relied on in solving the puzzling issues on which the human community contemplates to find out the solutions. Pragmatism, in this sense, has contributed in making epistemology an activity of action and clarification. It is an ordinary act like 'speech act' (Ludwig Wittgenstein) or political action which has evolved in human species and has helped in making the human community adapting in adverse natural and social conditions.

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