“Pragmatic” is a compliment sometimes paid to politicians (Barack Obama’s supporters describe him that way), and it is often used as an honorific indicating a person of common sense who knows how to get things done. “Pragmatic” is also related (at least etymologically) to pragmatism, the name of a distinctively American philosophy that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century in the work of William James, John Dewey and C.S. Peirce. Pragmatism may or may not be an ethical program depending on whose version you are reading, but it always emphasizes the resources of historically given institutions and practices and de-emphasizes the role played in our lives by supra-historical essentialisms (God, faith, truth, reason, brute fact, overarching theory) even to the extent sometimes of denying their existence.

Like any philosophy pragmatism offers answers to the questions the tradition of philosophical inquiry has been asking since its beginning. What is truth? What is real? How are we to act? What is the source of moral and/or epistemological authority? Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to these questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like “Be ye perfect”). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the “ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind.” Pragmatism “completely undermines any assurances, empirical or transcendental, that exceed the provisionality of what we may consensually construct (in our own time) as a workable conjecture about the way the world is.” I quote from Joseph Margolis’s new book “Pragmatism’s Advantage,” which is, he says, that it is among the “very small number of Western philosophical movements … that … never exceed the natural competence and limitations of mere human being.”

Why is that an advantage? Because, Margolis asserts, it avoids having to choose between “the alleged necessity of some ineliminable invariance in thought and/or reality” and some wholesale subjectivism or idealism that claims “that the natural world is itself constituted or constructed by the cognizing mind.” On the one hand, no “transcendental faculty” of reason or some other quasi-deity that will guide us infallibly if only we attach ourselves to it (not that there haven’t been any candidates for this honored position; there have in fact been many, too many). On the other hand, no surrender to the “preposterous doctrine” that we just make it all up as we go along. Instead pragmatism, Margolis explains, “favors a constructive (or constructivist) realism … freed from every form of cognitive, rational, and practical privilege … [and] committed to the continuities of animal nature and human culture, confined to the existential and historical contingencies of the human condition, and open in principle to plural, partial, perspectived, provisional, even nonconverging ways of understanding.”

Quite a mouthful, but we can make it manageable by asking just what is a “constructive realism”? In the vocabulary pragmatism rejects, “realism” is (among other things) the thesis that (a) the world is independent of us and our thoughts, and (b) therefore our thoughts (or interpretations or calculations) should always be checked against, and evaluated as adequate or inadequate by, that independent and prior world. Pragmatists by and large accept (a), but not (b). They believe with Richard Rorty (a key figure in the revival of pragmatism in the last quarter of the 20th century) that “things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states” — the world, in short, is “out there” — but they also believe that the knowledge we have (or think we have) of the world is given not by it, but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms (Thomas Kuhn’s word) that are in place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description.

While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: “The real world … is not a construction of mind or Mind … but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive powers of the human.” Thus the content of realism — of what the best up-to-date accounts of the world tell us — is constructively determined by the workings of a culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation that is itself a constructed artifact and as such can change even as it guides and assesses research. In the absence of the alternative pragmatism rejects — something called Mind equipped with something called reason which enables it to describe accurately something called the World (Bacon’s dream) — “realism cannot fail to be constructivist, though reality is not itself … constructed” (Margolis).

A constructive realism will still make use of words like “true” and “better,” but these are judgments that a proposition is or is not warranted — has sufficient evidence backing it up — within the prevailing paradigms. (What higher judgment could here be? Kuhn asks.) In the event of a paradigm change — not an event that can be predicted or planned; it takes the form of conversion not demonstration — there will be new canons of evidence and new measures of warrant. Notice how far this is from saying that “anything goes.” At any moment the protocols and procedures in place will enforce a rigor of method and interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and has its shape entirely within “the existential and historical contingencies of the human situation” and not in a realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical.

The implications of the pragmatist argument are at once far reaching and unthreatening. They are far reaching because, as Margolis points out, “If realism takes a constructivist turn, then all the normative features of the sciences (say truth and validity) must be constructivist as well — as … our moral and political norms would be.” These implications are unthreatening because if the pragmatist account is right it is describing what has always been the case. When Margolis announces that there are “no privileged faculties, no preestablished harmony, no exceptionless universals, no assured natural necessities … no escape from the contingencies of whatever we report as ‘given’ within human experience,” he is not ushering in a new age, but describing the necessary condition of all the old ones. It has ever been thus (again, if pragmatism is right), and yet the world’s business has always been done.

Often, however, it has been done badly and that explains what Margolis calls “our remarkable appetite for the dictates of reason,” for something that would, if we could specify it and hold to it, enable us to avoid error and reduce contingency and provisionality to the point where our actions, both physical and mental, would be truly and firmly grounded. Pragmatism takes that hope away and tells us that all we can do is muddle through, that we have been muddling through for a long time, and that, with luck, we will continue to muddle through, and in the process, perhaps, develop new forms of the “cultural artifact” we are and develop too new forms of knowledge to serve our artefactual purposes. The story so far has been an amazing one, full of wonder and full of horror. It is a story, says Margolis (following Kuhn) driven from behind and not by a teleological end awaiting us in the form either of a union with deity or an ascent to the realm of pure Reason. It is, Margolis tells us, “an extraordinary form of bootstrapping.”

Does knowing that we are bootstrapping rather than marching to the tune of some “ineliminable invariance” help us to do it better? Is pragmatism’s advantage more than philosophical, in the academic sense? Does it enable those who are persuaded by it to live improved lives? Rorty thought so, thought that pragmatists would be less cruel, more open, more tolerant and inclusive than those who were bound to an essence that called them to acts of exclusionary judgment.

Margolis flirts with the idea that pragmatism confers such benefits of character in a single sentence when he says of our “deep longing” for invariance that is “has siphoned off our energies from the better prospects of what to believe and do under the conditions of practical life.” But we hear no more in that line and that’s a good thing because the last thing pragmatism should want to do on its way to jettisoning every supra-historical assurance in sight is to offer itself as a superior one.

But if pragmatism doesn’t have a real world payoff, if it is of no help when the next crisis comes your way, what’s the use of it? Why should anyone be interested in it? Behind these questions is a larger one: why should anyone be interested in philosophy in any of its versions? The usual answer is that philosophy, by identifying first principles, can serve both to guide and justify our actions. When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.