Information Research Weblog

I caught part of Melvin Bragg's 'In our time' programme on Radio 4 this morning. This is an often fascinating series on philosophy, science, history, culture, etc., etc., which is available for download from the BBC site. Today's piece was on American Pragmatism and the work of William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce.

It is interesting for information scientists because of the focus of pragmatism on aligning 'truth' with 'what works' and also for its identification of truth with social interaction and, overall, the general implications for the nature of scientific inquiry and research methods. The contributors on these programmes, chaired by Bragg, are always experts in their field. On this occasion, the discussion involved A C Grayling, Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; and Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Given the period of the pragmatists, a good deal of material is on the Web: for example, for William James, the site at Emory University has much of his work; for John Dewey, there's a copy of his 'Democracy and education' on the Project Gutenberg site and more at the Brock University site; while for Peirce, the Erratic Impact site is useful.