Pragmatism as a Paradigm for Social Research

Pragmatism as a Philosophy

The crude summary of pragmatism as merely asking about “what works” has been a perennial problem (Dewey, 1920/2008), so it is hardly surprising that it is occurring once again. Of course, a similar kind of caricature also exists for simplistic versions of constructivism, in which social structure exists only in the imaginations of atomistic individuals, and in retrograde summaries of post-positivism, which still insist on a one-to-one correspondence between our observations and some external reality. Fortunately, the ongoing discussions of the last decades about paradigms (Guba, 1990) have created a more sophisticated understanding of constructivism and post-positivism as paradigms for social research. Unfortunately, the omission of pragmatism from that debate has limited our understanding of it as a philosophical system. Hence, clarifying the value of pragmatism as a philosophy for social research requires getting past an emphasis on practicality.

The sheer difficulty of designing and carrying out MMR helps explain the field’s attraction to the portions of pragmatism that highlight workable approaches to problem solving. MMR as a research community has a strong tendency to emphasize the how to aspects of research; however, this captures only part of the message of pragmatism, which places more importance on questions about why to do research in a given way. Following the path of classical pragmatism (e.g., James, 1907/1995), we need to ask, What difference does it makes to do our research one way rather than another? When we ask “why to” questions, this points to the importance of our choice of research goals. Yet even the “how to” questions involve more than making technical decisions about research methods because of the commitments we make when we chose one way rather than another to pursue our goals. Thus, a limited emphasis on “what works” is never enough, because it ignores choices about both the goals to be pursued and the means to meet those goals.

Denzin (2012) summarizes the importance of these issues as follows:

The MMR links to the pragmatism of Dewey, James, Mead, and Peirce are problematic. Classic pragmatism is not a methodology per se. It is a doctrine of meaning, a theory of truth. It rests on the argument that the meaning of an event cannot be given in advance of experience. The focus is on the consequences and meanings of an action or event in a social situation. This concern goes beyond any given methodology or any problem-solving activity. (p. 81)

Stating that pragmatism as a philosophy goes beyond problem solving is a key point. There is a distinct trap here that needs to be avoided, because the fundamental principles of pragmatism are indeed well suited to the analysis of problem solving as a human activity. Given the importance of problem solving for research in general and research design in particular, it is hardly surprising that the renewed interest in pragmatism within the social sciences has arisen within this context. This historical circumstance has, however, downplayed other aspects of pragmatism. One of the best places to get a sense of both the broad outlines of pragmatism as a philosophy and its orientation to problem solving is in the work of John Dewy.

Dewey’s Concept of Experience

Throughout his career, Dewey sought to promote pragmatism by reorienting philosophy away from abstract concerns and turning it instead toward an emphasis on human experience (Dewey, 1920/2008; 1925a/2008). For Dewey, experience is built around two inseparable questions: What are the sources of our beliefs? And, what are the meanings of our actions? The answers to these two questions are linked in a cycle, in which the origins of our beliefs arise from our prior actions and the outcomes of our actions are found in our beliefs. Experiences create meaning by bringing beliefs and actions in contact with each other (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Dewey’s model of experience.

From Dewey’ standpoint, experiences always involve a process of interpretation. Beliefs must be interpreted to generate action, and actions must be interpreted to generate beliefs. Many of our experiences occur in a relatively unquestioned fashion that Dewey termed habit (Dewey, 1922/2008), in which the beliefs that we have acquired from previous experiences can adequately handle the demands for action in our current circumstances. In this case, much of what we do happens in a semi-automated state that does not require careful decision making. For example, making breakfast typically does involve some choices, but many of our actions in the situation are almost purely habitual. In contrast to habit, Dewey describes inquiry as a process of self-conscious decision making. Many problematic situations require thoughtful reflection, and this is where inquiry comes into play. As an example, the tendency to treat inquiry and research as synonyms indicates the importance of careful, reflective decision making in research. Because inquiry places such a central role in both Dewey’s thinking and the research process, the next section of this article will take up the concept of inquiry in some detail.

Whether experiences are based on habit or active inquiry, they always occur within some specific context. This context dependency means that our ability to use prior experience to predict the outcome of a current action is fallible and probabilistic—there is always the chance that our prior experiences will not be sufficient to guide our actions in a given setting, or that what appear to be the safest assumptions will fail to produce the expected outcome. More specifically, Dewey treats all experience as both historically and culturally located (1922/2008). This cultural and historical dependency, and the changing nature of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, is a crucial reason why reasoning from past experience can only be fallible and probabilistic.

Words like reasoning and probabilistic can make it seem as if the connection between belief and action is based on cold, cognitive rationality. On the contrary, Dewey argues argued that experiences always have an emotional, embodied element, in which feelings provide an essential link between beliefs and actions. From this standpoint, feelings are often both the sources and the outcomes of our experiences. Dewey often spoke of the extent to which the outcome of an action was “satisfying” (1925a/2008), by which he meant both a degree of positive affect and the sense of meeting or satisfying some hope, desire, or need.

This description of experience also has the potential to make it seem too individualistic, whereas experiences for Dewey are always social in nature. Dewey’s thinking in this area (1922/2008; 1925b/2008) is very similar to Mead’s, which is hardly surprising because they were colleagues in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago as well as personal friends. From the first moments of infancy, our experiences are shaped by others. As we mature, even our private thoughts are based on concepts that have been socially shaped. Consequently, all beliefs and all actions are social, so all of our experiences are inescapably social.

For Dewey as a professional philosopher, this emphasis on human experience created a strong contrast with the established philosophy of his day. Rather than metaphysical discussions about the nature of reality or truth, Dewey and other pragmatists called for a different starting point that was rooted in life itself—a life that was inherently contextual, emotional, and social. This does not mean that Dewey’s pragmatism lacked a philosophy of knowledge, but instead of traditional metaphysics he relied on a process-based approach to knowledge, in which inquiry was the defining process.

Dewey’s Concept of Inquiry as a Basis for Research

As noted above, inquiry is a specific kind of experience. What distinguishes inquiry is that it is a process by which beliefs that have become problematic are examined and resolved through action. It is a process of making choices by asking and answering questions, in which those questions concern the likely outcomes of applying current beliefs to future action. In Dewey’s approach to inquiry (1910b/2008), there is no sharp boundary between everyday life and research. Instead, research is simply a form of inquiry that is performed more carefully and more self-consciously than most other responses to problematic situations. Just as a decision about buying a car demands more attention than what to order for lunch, research in general requires a considerable amount of effort to make the choices that are most likely to have the desired consequences. Overall, however, inquiry is just one form of experience, and research is just one form of inquiry.

Dewey’s systematic approach to inquiry involves five steps, which can be summarized as follows (for more detailed treatments of Dewey and inquiry, see Biesta & Barbules, 2004; Morgan, 2013; Strubing, 2007):

Figure 2 shows how the process of inquiry provides an explicit mechanism for linking beliefs and actions, but it is important not to treat inquiry as a kind of short circuit that interrupts the cyclical connection between beliefs and actions. Therefore, rather than a step-by-step linear process, beliefs and their interpretations operate throughout, as potential actions are mentally rehearsed and evaluated. Inquiry is thus, like any form of experience, a continuous process that may involve many cycles between beliefs and actions before there is any sense of resolution.

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Figure 2.

Dewey’s model of inquiry.

Like any other form of experience, each instance of inquiry is situated within a given context. For pragmatism, every set of circumstances that we encounter brings forth some potentially unknowable set of prior beliefs, so that we are always acting within some definition of the situation. When we are pursuing a research project, we are acting within a mind-set that determines what it means to choose one research topic rather than another as well as what it means to choose one research method rather than another. Of course, these choices can be quite different when we are doing qualitative, quantitative, or MMR.

Once again, it is important not to confuse inquiry with a purely rational or disembodied process of logical reasoning. Emotions and preferences operate throughout the inquiry process, starting most notably with a feeling that something is problematic in a situation. Our feelings color every aspect of the inquiry process, or as William James put it, “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything” (1907/1995, p. 26). When we do research, we make our choices according to what we believe is good or bad, right or wrong, and these choices clearly involve preferences between likely outcomes as we ask what difference it would make to do our research one way rather than another.

Following Dewey, it is also essential to recognize that any process of inquiry is always social in nature. Even when an inquiry is based solely on our individual thoughts, those thoughts and the standards that we use to apply them have social origins. In research, one of the most explicit social dimensions is the concept of peer review, in which we anticipate and interpret how our choices will be received by others in our field. In addition, the choices that we make are not abstract interpretations of the “rules” that govern our particular realm of research; instead, as Denzin (2010) notes, “Of course, what works is more than an empirical question. It involves the politics of evidence” (p. 422). Thus, any statement about the results from a piece of research is subject to the judgments of others who may or may not share our beliefs and standards.

In summary, Dewey’s philosophy of knowledge relies on his concept of inquiry, in which actions as outcomes of inquiry serve as the basis for beliefs. It is certainly possible to state this process as the production of knowledge, but Dewey preferred to avoid this word because it was so closely associated with what he called the “epistemological industry” (Dewey, 1941/2008). Instead of knowledge, he spoke as “warranted assertions,” where warrants come from the outcomes of inquiry—that is, the outcomes of using a belief in practice, in which knowing cannot be separated from doing. For Dewey, the knower and the known were inseparable, bound together in a process of inquiry, with a simultaneous reliance on both belief and action.

Dewey claimed that his emphasis on inquiry was the basis for a reconsideration of philosophy in general. At the broadest level, Dewey’s pragmatism as a philosophy addresses the central question: What is the nature of human experience? Refocusing on inquiry as a central form of human experience requires reconsidering the philosophy of knowledge by replacing the older emphasis on ontology and epistemology with a concentration on inquiries about the nature of human experience. It is thus quite reasonable to treat Dewey as proposing a new paradigm for his own field.

Pragmatism as a Paradigm

Much of Dewey’s philosophical agenda is highly relevant for social research today, because he sought to break down the dualism between realism and idealism. This contrast is very close to the separation between post-positivism and constructivism, in which differentiation of these two “paradigms” has been a central feature in applying the philosophy of knowledge to social research (e.g., Guba & Lincoln, 2005). In this philosophical system, post-positivists claim that the world exists apart from our understanding of it, while constructivists insist that the world is created by our conceptions of it. For Dewey (1925a/2008), these two assertions are equally important claims about the nature of human experience. On one hand, our experiences in the world are necessarily constrained by the nature of that world; on the other hand, our understanding of the world is inherently limited to our interpretations of our experiences. We are not free to believe anything we want about the world if we care about the consequences of acting on those beliefs. Within Dewey’s pragmatism and its emphasis on experience, ontological arguments about either the nature of the outside world or the world of our conceptions are just discussions about two sides of the same coin.

Dewey’s rejection of arguments about the nature of reality is not the same, however, as denying the differences between post-positivism and constructivism as approaches to research. Researchers from these traditions have very difference experiences in the world of research, and these experiences lead to different beliefs and different actions. The point here is that any attempt to produce knowledge occurs within a social context. Morgan (2007) interprets Kuhn’s (1996) concept of paradigms in terms of the importance of “shared beliefs within a community of researchers who share a consensus about which questions are most meaningful and which methods are most appropriate for answering those questions” (2007, p. 53). Paradigms are thus social worlds where research communities exert a powerful influence over the beliefs we consider to be “meaningful” and the actions we accept as “appropriate.”

Using a conception of paradigms as shared beliefs within a community of researchers, what we know as and post-positivism and constructivism easily fit within this definition due to the distinctive research experiences that they define and promote. Rather than assigning post-positivism and constructivism a priori to different ontological and epistemological camps, a pragmatist would focus on their characteristic approaches to inquiry. Each of them creates its own world of research—different contexts with different feelings about and different standards for the nature of inquiry.

For metaphysical versions of the philosophy of knowledge, assumptions about the nature of reality determine the kinds of knowledge that are possible. For pragmatism, this abstraction is replaced by an emphasis on experience as the continual interaction of beliefs and action. This leads to questions about what difference it makes not only to acquire knowledge one way rather than another (i.e., the procedures we use), but to produce one kind of knowledge rather than another (i.e., the purposes we pursue). Knowledge is not about an abstract relationship between the knower and the known; instead, there is an active process of inquiry that creates a continual back-and-forth movement between beliefs and actions.

The key point here is that pragmatism as a paradigm can account for one of the most distinctive features of the previous paradigm—the importance of distinguishing between post-positivism and constructivism—without relying on metaphysical assumptions about ontology and epistemology. Pragmatism not only replaces arguments about the nature of reality as the essential criterion for differentiating approaches to research, it also recognizes the value of those different approaches as research communities that guide choices about how to conduct inquiry. Thus, pragmatism acts as a new paradigm to replace an older way of thinking about the differences between approaches to research by treating those differences as social contexts for inquiry as a form of social action, rather than as abstract philosophical systems.

Dewey and other classic pragmatists felt that the longstanding debates in traditional metaphysics were seriously misguided. By ignoring the centrality of human experience, these debated simply asked the wrong questions. Of course, this dismissal of metaphysical issues will not sit well with those who advocate for their importance in understanding social research. Accordingly, Yvonna Lincoln (2010) complains, “The mixed-methods pragmatists tell us nothing about their ontology or epistemology” (p. 7). This demand that pragmatism pay attention to metaphysics is hardly new, and as noted above, Dewey himself saw his version of pragmatism as what we would now call a new paradigm within his home discipline of philosophy. Thus, in a passage from his work on evolution that sounds very much like Thomas Kuhn (1996), Dewey claims that rather than solving the traditional philosophical problems, we need to “get over them.”

Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. (Dewey, 1910/2008, p. 14)

Pragmatism presents a radical departure from age-old philosophical arguments about the nature of reality and the possibility of truth. As Hall (2013) puts it, pragmatism offers “an alternative epistemological paradigm” (p. 19). In this new worldview, knowledge consists of warranted assertions (Dewey, 1941/2008) that result from taking action and experiencing the outcomes. But inquiry in general and research in particular are specific realms of experience, and as such, they are only part of Dewey’s larger philosophical system. For Dewey, questions related to politics were at least as important as issues related to research, and the next section takes up this topic.

The Political Implications of Pragmatism

Examining the political and moral dimensions of pragmatism requires, once again, a distinction between the merely practical uses of pragmatism and its deeper philosophical content. Not surprisingly, the methods-centric view of pragmatism within most of MMR has led to little explicit discussion of the connection between social justice issues and pragmatism. Denzin (2010) thus raises the concern that turning our discourse about research into a discussion of procedures “leaves little space for issues connected to empowerment, social justice, and a politics of hope” (p. 420). At the same time, he recognizes the work of researchers who do pursue these goals from within MMR, such as Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) and Mertens (2003). At a more personal rather than philosophical level, Dewey himself was notably active in the progressive politics of his day, including working with Jane Addams at Hull House and playing a role in founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Still the question remains about whether there are deeper links between pragmatism and social justice.

As the previous discussion of inquiry noted, all our attempts to understand and act in the world are inherently contextual, emotional, and social. More specifically, pragmatism emphasizes that all aspects of research inherently involve decisions about which goals are most meaningful and which methods are most appropriate. As Denzin (2010) stresses, “Inquiry will always be a moral, political and value-laden enterprise” (pp. 424-425), and the same orientation is central to Dewey’s philosophy. His approach to questions of ethics, morality, and politics was identical to his arguments in other realms of experience (1925a/2008). In particular, he treated inquiry into ethical questions as continuous with other efforts to link existing beliefs with situations in which there is a need a for action. Ethical questions are questions about what to do and about the difference it would make to act one way versus another, and, as such, they fall directly within Dewey’s philosophical emphasis on human experience.

The central moral value that Dewey advocates for his version of pragmatism is freedom of inquiry (1925b/2008), in which individuals and social communities are able to define the issues that matter most to them and pursue those issues in the ways that are the most meaningful to them. His version of inquiry as the revision of beliefs places a central emphasis on the capacity for growth. In particular, he was opposed to any use of force or economic domination that would limit the possibilities for growth of other social groups. This leads to a natural fit between pragmatism and many versions of transformative or emancipatory research through a shared emphasis on openness, fairness, and freedom from oppression.

Saying that Dewey’s philosophy has a position on moral and political experience is not the same, however, as saying that his version of pragmatism presented a detailed method or coherent agenda for action. Dewey has been rightly criticized on these grounds, most notably by C. Wright Mills (1964), who highlights how Dewey’s vision of democracy never advanced beyond the kind of face-to-face interaction he encountered in his New England upbringing. This limited perspective is evident in one of Dewey’s (1939/2008a) late essays in which he explicitly claims the superiority of American democracy in opposition to the fascist movements in Europe and then notes,

I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (p. 227)

Rather than staying within the limited political position developed by Dewey and other classic pragmatists, more recent versions of pragmatism have developed a stronger bond to a social justice agenda. This is particularly notable in the work of pragmatist feminists such as Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996, 2002a), Shannon Sullivan (2001), and Judy Whipps (2010). The value of this line of work is that it not only demonstrates the value of pragmatism as a philosophy for feminism but also points out the ways that feminism can develop a social justice agenda within pragmatism. Thus, Seigfried (2002b) points out that

Dewey does consistently argue against the subjugation of women, racial and ethnic or other minorities, and the working class, and for their emancipation and full participation in Society. He thinks that these goals can be accomplished through rational persuasion . . . What is needed is need to complete his analyses and proposals is a more penetrating account of the sources of inherited prejudice. (p. 60)

Thus, a feminist analysis of power, prejudice, and oppression has much to offer to Dewey’s overly optimistic version of conflict resolution. In other words, he offers a vision of progressive politics that was in keeping with his own times but which can benefit directly from subsequent analyses of these issues.

Recognizing that pragmatism provides a strong match with the advocacy of social justice certainly does not claim that it is the only way to make the connection between politics and research. Lincoln (2010) argues that generations of feminists and other researchers who advocate for social justice “view epistemology as deeply linked to method, and vice versa” (p. 7). Making this linkage, however, typically requires an expansion to include axiology as a fourth defining element, alongside the traditional triad of ontology, epistemology, and methodology. According to Hesse-Biber (2012),

Axiology means being cognizant of our values, attitudes, and biases and acknowledging how these might play out in research praxis in terms of (a) what questions are asked or not asked in our research, (b) what type of data are or are not collected, and (c) the type of methods, measurement, analysis, and interpretation that shape our understanding of the research process. (p. 878)

As the preceding discussion indicates, these same defining characteristics also underlie pragmatism as a philosophy. The difference is that these principles flow directly from pragmatism’s core assumptions about the nature of inquiry without any need to add axiology as a separate element. While there is no doubt that metaphysical discussions about the nature of reality and truth can be extended to handle the political and ethical aspects of research, pragmatism as a philosophical paradigm has the advantage of naturally assigning a central role of politics and ethics in every aspect of human experience.

Once again, the larger point is that pragmatism as a broad paradigm for social research can account for the accomplishments of the previous paradigm without the need for metaphysical assumptions. In this case, pragmatism can stand outside the previous assumptions and still provide at least as strong a bond to social justice goals. Both social justice and pragmatism treat our actions as researchers as located within belief systems, in which those beliefs are subject to change by our conscious actions. Furthermore, both the experiences we bring to research and the changes we hope to produce are context bound, embodied and emotional, and thoroughly social in nature. Taken together, these strengths point to both the value of classical pragmatism as an orientation toward social justice and the potential for current work on social justice to continue pragmatism’s development in this direction.

Conclusion

In considering the increased interest in pragmatism as a paradigm for social research, it is essential to recognize that paradigms are more than simple statements about future directions for research. From the perspective of pragmatism, new paradigms create new sets of beliefs that guide new kinds of actions. At a fundamental level, paradigms create new worldviews and social contexts that have widespread impacts on the conduct of inquiry.

Understanding the shift toward pragmatism as a paradigm begins with the recent history of social research methodology, from which interest in pragmatism emerged through its association with MMR. MMR, in turn, arose in a period when it was expected that any approach to social research would have a metaphysical paradigm explicitly based on the philosophy of knowledge. Yet, MMR did not fit comfortably within that context. In particular, most of the focus in MMR was on practical, procedural issues about how to combine the strengths of qualitative and quantitative methods rather than philosophical claims. Thus, for most of the researchers operating within the field of MMR, the appeal of pragmatism was more about its practicality than in its broader philosophical basis.

That is the setting for this article—a moment when pragmatism has been proposed as a new paradigm for social research, yet its potential in this regard has remained underdeveloped. The time has come for social research to dig more deeply into pragmatism as a philosophy, and that has been the goal of this article. The most basic objective has been to demonstrate that pragmatism presents a coherent philosophy that goes well beyond “what works.” Based on the work of John Dewey, pragmatism points to the importance of joining beliefs and actions in a process of inquiry that underlies any search for knowledge, including the specialized activity that we refer to as research.

One distinct consequence of advocating pragmatism as a paradigm is to disrupt the reliance on a metaphysical version of the philosophy of knowledge as a lens for examining social research. Although this disruptive influence may not have been an intentional goal in the original pairing of pragmatism and MMR, pragmatism insists on treating research as a human experience that is based on the beliefs and actions of actual researchers. This is quite different from characterizing social research in terms of ontology, epistemology, and methodology; even so, it does not imply that the older approach was “wrong.” Instead, pragmatism would understand the prior paradigm as a set of beliefs and actions that were uniquely important within a given set of circumstances. Since then, circumstances have changed in ways that call for a new methodological agenda.

Rather than framing the study of social science research as commitments to an abstract set of philosophical beliefs, pragmatism concentrates on beliefs that are more directly connected to actions. This calls for an approach to methodology that goes back to its original linguistic roots, the study of methods. Pragmatism shifts the study of social research to questions such as: How do researchers make choices about the way they do research? Why do they make the choices they do? And, what is the impact of making one set of choices rather than another? Although these questions are not new, making them the center of our program for studying social research reorients us to a new set of issues and goals.

Pursuing this new agenda requires examining not just what researchers do but why they do things the ways they do. Research never occurs in a vacuum, so how it influenced by the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which it is done? And how do our research communities come together to emphasize one way of doing things rather than another? We need to pay more attention to how these factors influence both the choices we make and the ways that we interpret the outcomes of those choices. This is the path that pragmatism proposes.

Like any change in paradigms, accepting pragmatism as a basis for social research will require a considerable alteration in our thinking. The same kind of change occurred in the 1980s when the philosophy of knowledge arose as a paradigm for understanding the nature of social research. Thirty years later, it is time to put metaphysical issues behind us and pursue the decisions that drive the practice of research. Switching to this new paradigm does indeed require effort, but the benefits that it provides are well worth it.