Pragmatism

Definition

Pragmatism is the philosophical tradition, founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and developed by William James and John Dewey, that anchors the meaning and truth of ideas in their practical consequences. For architecture, pragmatism means that "ideas gain legitimacy as they are put to some practical use" (Coyne); architecture is fundamentally "a practical and pragmatic discipline, grounded in the materiality of the world." Unlike approaches that treat architecture as a formal language or symbolic system, pragmatism emphasizes architecture as practice — a mode of inquiry in which problems are encountered, hypotheses are abductively formed, and solutions are tested through doing. Coyne argues Peirce's pragmatism influenced the Design Methods Movement and continues to speak to smart cities, big data, and biomimetic architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Charles Sanders Peirce — founded pragmatism as a method of clarifying ideas by their practical consequences.
• Richard Coyne — pragmatism's relevance for architecture: practice grounded in materiality.

Related Concepts

• Abduction — the creative, hypothesis-forming mode of reasoning central to pragmatic inquiry.
• Indexicality — the evidential, materially-grounded sign that pragmatic reasoning works with.
• Semiotics — Peirce's semiotics is a pragmatic semiotics, in contrast to Saussure's structuralism.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Peirce for Architects — pragmatism as the philosophical ground of architecture as practice.