The Pragmatic Turn – Thinking That Must Work
I remember when I first encountered Richard J. Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn. It did not feel like reading philosophy in the traditional sense. It felt more like meeting a way of thinking that I had already been living—without always having the words for it.
As a social worker, I have always been drawn toward what works. Not in a simplistic or technical sense, but in the deeper, human sense: What actually helps? What makes a difference in a life that is struggling?
This is where pragmatism meets me.
Jane Addams is perhaps the figure I return to most often. Not only because she was one of the early shapers of pragmatism, but because she lived it. She did not separate thinking from doing. Her philosophy grew out of lived encounters with poverty, inequality, and human dignity. That matters to me. It reminds me that philosophy is not something we stand outside of—it is something we live inside.
Bernstein shows that pragmatism is not a closed chapter in the history of philosophy. It is alive. And perhaps more relevant now than ever.
This illustration is created by OpenAI/ChatGPT in co-operation with the author
Where It Began – and Why It Still Matters
There is something almost poetic in the way pragmatism entered the philosophical scene.
In 1898, William James stands before an audience in Berkeley and names something that had not yet been fully named. He points to Charles Sanders Peirce and says: here is the beginning.
From that moment, pragmatism becomes visible.
But what strikes me is not just the historical moment—it is the courage to name a way of thinking that refuses to stay within fixed boundaries.
Even early on, critics pointed out that pragmatism seemed impossible to define. Lovejoy famously identified thirteen different meanings of the term and dismissed it as unclear.
And yet, I find myself thinking: perhaps that is exactly the point.
Life is not one thing. Human experience is not one thing. Why should philosophy be?
A Philosophy That Must Be Lived
John Dewey described pragmatism as instrumental experimentalism. For me, this is more than a concept—it is a description of how life actually unfolds.
We do not begin with certainty. We begin in situations.
We try. We fail. We adjust. We try again.
In my own work, I have seen this again and again. No theory survives unchanged when it meets a real human life. And yet, theory is not useless. It becomes a tool—a way of seeing, a way of acting, a way of staying present in complexity.
This is where pragmatism feels honest.
It does not promise final answers. It invites responsible action.
What I learned during my education was, in many ways, indirect knowledge. It could not simply be transferred into practice.
I often knew, in theory, what should be done. I had the models, the frameworks, the interventions that were considered appropriate—for example when working with a child or a young person struggling with behavioral challenges, substance use, or involvement in crime.
But in practice, theory was not enough.
Because if the young person had a different understanding of their situation—if they carried a different logic, a different way of coping—then the theory alone did not work.
It was not my solution that mattered most.
It was theirs.
They were the ones living the difficulty. And so, we had to find something that actually worked—together.
Hilary Putnam – A Thinker I Return To
Among the many voices within pragmatism, Hilary Putnam is one I keep returning to.
Perhaps because his intellectual journey mirrors something deeply human: the willingness to change one’s mind.
He began within logical positivism—searching for clarity, precision, and certainty. Later, he explored relativism, where truth becomes dependent on perspective. But he did not stay there.
Because if everything is relative, then nothing can truly guide us.
Putnam moved toward something more grounded. A realism that is not rigid, but responsive. A realism that acknowledges that we experience the world through language, through symbols, through interpretation—yet still insists that something resists us, something meets us.
“Mind Is What Mind Does”
One of Putnam’s ideas that stays with me is functionalism.
“Mind is what mind does.”
There is something liberating in this. It shifts the focus away from abstract definitions and toward lived function. What does a feeling do? What does a thought lead to? How does a mental state shape action?
In practice, this matters.
Because when I meet a person in distress, I am less interested in labeling the state than in understanding its role in that person’s life. What is this experience doing? What is it trying to solve? Where is it leading?
This is a pragmatic question.
Truth – Not as Abstraction, but as Guidance
Putnam’s later reflections on truth resonate deeply with my own experience.
We often speak of truth as something fixed, something “out there.” But in lived life, truth appears differently. It is connected to what we are trying to do, to how we orient ourselves, to what helps us move forward.
Truth, in this sense, is not arbitrary.
But it is also not detached.
It is something we discover in action—in the ongoing interaction between ourselves and the world.
This is not a weakening of truth. It is, in many ways, a deepening of it.
Why Pragmatism Matters to Me
When I read Bernstein, I do not just encounter ideas. I encounter a tradition that gives language to something I have long felt:
That thinking and acting belong together.
That philosophy should not distance us from life, but bring us closer to it.
That we are always already involved—making choices, taking responsibility, trying to do what is good in situations that are rarely simple.
Pragmatism does not remove uncertainty.
But it gives us a way to live within it.
And perhaps that is enough.
References
Addams, J. (1910). Twenty years at Hull-House. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Bernstein, R. J. (2010). The pragmatic turn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dewey, J. (1929). The quest for certainty: A study of the relation of knowledge and action. New York, NY: Minton, Balch & Company.
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Lovejoy, A. O. (1908). The thirteen pragmatisms. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 5(1), 5–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/2012812
Peirce, C. S. (1878). How to make our ideas clear. Popular Science Monthly, 12, 286–302.
Putnam, H. (2004). Ethics without ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, truth and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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