"Pragmatism"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Williams James opines that the most commonly offered alternative to the popular concept of monism is pluralism, which is equally interesting, provocative and valuable. He believes that monism and pluralism are not necessarily antagonistic concepts. The author points out that, from the pragmatic perspective, the most important concrete implication of predicated oneness is generic unity involving simple sorting, categorization schemata and hierarchical arrangement of related elements. The paper relates that James' description of the "old truths", which seem to be inherited rather than learned anew by each individual, is reminiscent of Jung's collective unconscious, which also has a pragmatic character in that archetypes serve practical purposes for the human species.

From the Paper:

"The concepts of monism and pluralism as typically considered are rather abstract. Pragmatism requires, however, that we render them concrete by asking how the veracity of one or the other would impact our experience. In other words, what difference does it make whether the universe is one entity or an infinite set of diverse entities? Some monists would rejoice at the phrasing in the immediately previous sentence, according to James, because the word "set" seems to reflect an inherent "oneness." If one were to accuse the monist of "semantic tricks," it might be pointed out that linguistic oneness is, in fact, one of several essentially pragmatic "unities" that inform the question raised previously regarding what practical difference unity versus plurality might involve. That is, language assigns "labels" that define a subject of discourse."

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