Pragmatism and the Knowledge Graph

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a word derived from the Greek word ‘pragma’ meaning ‘action’ or ‘practice’, and refers to the idea of judging the truth of things ‘not from theory or belief, but from the results of action’.

Pragmatism is translated in Japanese as ‘pragmatism’, ‘actualism’ or ‘pragmatism’, and does not necessarily refer to a philosophical position or school of philosophical thought, but is now used in a wider sense to refer to a practical way of looking at things, a practical way of life, or the idea that ‘anything is OK as long as the result is OK’. Pragmatism is also used to refer to a pragmatic way of looking at things, a practical way of life, an idea or style in which “everything is OK as long as the result is OK”.

It is also said that there are as many answers to the question of what pragmatism is as there are pragmatists, and that there is no clear definition.

Leading pragmatists include Charles Sanders Perth, William James, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Dewey, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty.

Charles Sanders Peirce, the philosopher, scientist and logician who coined the term pragmatism, in 1870, shortly after the Meiji era in Japan, organised a debate at Harvard University called the Metaphysics Club, in which he gave the name of this idea. He used it for the first time to stress its importance.

When Pearse first formed and raised the idea, he was surrounded by people such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Chauncey Wright, who were beginning to become young professionals and researchers in various fields, including law, philosophy, medicine, theology and psychology. 1870 was the largest civil war in the USA, Civil War, was only five years old, and it could be said that they sought to express under the style of philosophical debate the keen awareness of young people left after this very tragic experience.

William James, a psychologist and philosopher at Herbard University, was a world-wide exponent of the significance of pragmatism. He delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Ideological Concept and Practical Effects of Philosophy’ in which he made a strong case for this philosophical idea as an independent and systematic worldview, a theory of man, and an original idea about the intellectual capacities and nature of man.

According to James, pragmatism was originally a ‘method’ and is now a theory of ‘truth’, an idea with two faces: ‘method’ and ‘truth’. Method here means a basic theory of the ‘method’ of intellectual inquiry, while a theory of truth means a generalisation and formulation of this basic theory of method so that it can be used in an even wider range of philosophical areas.

After James’s lecture, not only did thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Edouard Le Roy and Gaston Milhaud in France express their admiration, but many others, including F C S Schiller in the UK and John Dewey in the USA, also came forward to endorse this idea, which became the dominant thought in the late 19th century and early 20th century The idea was recognised as one of the leading Western trends of thought from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.

Kitaro Nishida, who is mentioned in “Kitaro Nishida’s Study of the Good“, was introduced to James’s thought by his friend D. T. Suzuki, who is also mentioned in “Meditation, Enlightenment and Problem Solving“. In his “Introduction to Philosophy” at Kyoto University in the Taisho era (1912), he translated this philosophy as “utilitarianism” and stated that “Truth is the origin of what is useful and useful in life. There is no such thing as truth in itself, which is eternal and unchanging”.

neo-pragmatism

Willard van Orman Quine was a philosopher and logician who encouraged the ideological revival of pragmatism, and was the leading American heir of the English-speaking analytic philosophy represented by Bertrand Russell in England. Two Dogmas”, in which he identified the fundamental problems of another then prevailing school of thought, logical positivism, and explained the significance of the idea of pragmatism as a principle of thought that should replace it.

With this argument, pragmatism was revitalised as a more sophisticated philosophical thought that had escaped the baptism of logical positivism, and his work became what is also known as ‘neo-pragmatism’.

In the USA in the first half of the 20th century, other than the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap and others imported from Europe, and factual truths as straightforward scientific truths about the external world, there can be no other types of truths, such as truths about morality or aesthetic values. Although the idea that these are merely subjective feelings and beliefs was gaining strength, Quine and others’ thought took the stance of not recognising such a major principle of the distinction between fact and value, and criticised analyticism regarding truth.

In other words, Quine did not regard philosophy as an a priori invocation or foundational science to science, but as continuous with science, abolishing the analytic/comprehensive distinction in knowledge and proposing a holistic theory of knowledge and belief systems.

In other words, pragmatism does not highly value the significance of the ‘definition’ of a word, but rather the labels of ideas created by our intellect, the positions of ‘what-ism’ and ‘what-ism’, which do not have a firm definition as ideas in themselves, but have blurred boundaries and contours, and the ‘content’, ‘ meaning” and “definition” of an idea are more clearly understood only in the context of its specific use, in the situations where it is applied and utilised, rather than in its name, which is an important pillar of the thesis that this theory asserts.

Pragmatism and the Knowledge Graph.

Thus, pragmatism focuses thinking and action on practical consequences and meaning, where the value of an idea or theory is assessed on whether it produces real results or practical effects, and the importance of how an idea or belief affects actual behaviour and outcomes is emphasised.

Furthermore, truth is not considered to be static, but useful in certain contexts and situations, and truth is evaluated on the basis of its usefulness in a practical sense. Theories and ideas in pragmatism are therefore required to be flexible and responsive to changing situations and contexts.

Pragmatism emphasises the importance of individual experiences and perspectives, tends to accept that different perspectives have different truths, and emphasises that subjective factors influence understanding and judgement. It emphasises the importance of experience and the knowledge and understanding gained through experience, and considers concrete examples and phenomena based on experience to be more valuable than abstract concepts.

Knowledge graphs, which are often discussed in this blog in articles such as “Various uses and implementation examples of knowledge graphs“, represent information and knowledge within the framework of graph theory, and can visualise the structure of knowledge and information and facilitate understanding by showing various elements (nodes) and the relationships between these elements (edges). It can be used to visualise the structure of knowledge and information and facilitate understanding. It is also used in machine learning, as described in “Graph neural networks“, and in natural language processing, as described in “Natural language processing technology“, to extract meaningful information from large data sets and understand its relevance.

Knowledge graphs are a useful technology in terms of experience accumulation and utilisation, and can be valuable in a variety of practical settings. Pragmatist approaches in pragmatism can be used to elucidate the structure of knowledge and understanding using knowledge graphs and help promote practical use and understanding of meaning.