Evaluating pragmatically

Pragmatists take up some of the questions that have been central to the Western philosophical tradition: what is truth? What is objectivity? How might these be discovered or achieved? How should our political and social lives be structured? They find answers not in some supposedly transcendental realm, but as growing out of and remaining firmly rooted in our concrete dealings with the world. In the words of one of its founders, William James (1842-1910): ‘The trail of the human serpent is … over everything’.