Philosophical pragmatism,pragmatic agency,and the treatment of evidence in social work

Action, agency and transaction

Pragmatism’s point of departure is acting (Kratochwil, 2011) or action, rejecting a focus on ‘things’, as in empiricism, or the ‘mind’, as in rationalism (Dewey, 1917). For pragmatism, action pervades existence. Influenced by Charles Darwin, Dewey (1910, 1931) proposed a philosophy of progress, continuity and change, not of absolutes. Thus, no privileged position was afforded to human beings within nature. Humans, as any other organism of nature, is part of a continuity with the world. Accordingly, humans are not regarded as composed of different substances, one being the mind and the other the body (Descartes, 1993). Instead, the individual is one body-mind organism (Dewey, 1958). Rejecting the conventional mind-world dualism, Dewey opted for the terms ‘organism’ and ‘environment’, so as to emphasize that neither has metaphysical primacy and that each gives meaning to the other.

From this perspective, organisms are part of their environment, so they are simultaneously acting and being acted upon. Being constitutive of the world, humans are also constituted by it. They are in constant engagement with their surroundings, changing them and being changed by them. Accordingly, individuals are not static but emergent. They are made up of the circumstances in which they dwell. Further, even the most passive events and organisms are acting and exerting change. Their environment encompasses the totality of elements comprising it, inter alia, social, emotional, intellectual, cultural, and physical factors.

Therefore, for pragmatism, humans (organisms) are deeply intertwined with their contexts (environment) and action is the relationship between them. Moreover, Dewey emphasized the concept of ‘transaction’. He dismissed the prevailing notions of self-action and inter-action, which entailed, respectively, that things acted by their own powers, and that one thing is balanced against another thing as in causal relations (Dewey and Bentley, 1949). Transaction, in turn, entails “[…] that systems deal with aspects and phases of action without any attribution to elements or entities supposedly detachable from the system that includes them” (Smith, 2004: 137). Thus, the organism-environment transaction constitutes one indivisible unit. Consequently, pragmatic agency might be better grasped as transagency (Garcés, 2020).

This is best described in Dewey’s (1917: 10–11) account of experience, which is worth quoting at length:

Experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection in the literal sense of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo the consequences of its own actions. […] Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. The most patient patient is more than receptor. He is also an agent–a reactor, one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may influence what is still to happen. Sheer endurance, side-stepping evasions, are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view to what such treatment will accomplish. Even if we shut ourselves up in the most clam-like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an acute attitude, not an extinction of response. Just as there is no assertive action, no aggressive attack upon things as they are, which is all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part also a going on and a going through.

Since humans are inseparable of their contexts, pragmatism highlights human diversity. To pursue external validity, this is minimized by positivism, its rational agent, and EBP. To maintain realism, this is recognized by EIP’s attention to clients’ and practitioners’ preferences and judgments (Nevo and Slonim-Nevo, 2011).

Action, inquiry, and knowledge

Human action is expressed in doubt, belief, habit and inquiry. Doubt denotes a state of uneasiness produced by a situation characterized by uncertainty about how to proceed and act. Such a situation is referred to as an indeterminate situation. Belief refers to the opposite state, one of calm because action can be confidently advanced. Habit, in turn, is deeply internalized belief and is composed of acts structuring experience. It refers to “an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts” (Dewey in Hildebrand, 2008: 25, emphasis in the original).

Doubt and belief prompt action but differently. While belief guides action, doubt prompts action to overcome doubt itself. This search for belief is inquiry (Pierce, 1878). Once the belief is attained, the situation becomes determinate and assertions depicting this outcome are deemed warranted (Dewey, 1938).

Hence, for pragmatism inquiry is action. Human beings generate warranted assertibility by transacting with their contexts, which they partly constitute. Thus, knowing is regarded as action. It is acting with beliefs, purposes and creativity. As such, these elements become as intrinsic as empirical evidence is to statements about reality. The latter, in turn, do not solely offer an account of reality but shape it according to the imagination and beliefs that are warranted (Khalil, 2004). The activity of knowing contributes to the creation of what is known. Moreover, in this action the preferences of the knower change as they are being satisfied (Khalil, 2004). Therefore, in this process the knower changes as well.

At the same time, action is inquiry. This means that it is a transaction between the knower (agent with beliefs, imagination, interests, and preferences) and the known (object, environment or incentive). On the one hand, the environment helps bringing about an image or a belief in the knower’s mind; on the other, the knower interprets the environment in light of their intentions and past experiences (Khalil, 2004). That is, the known cannot be defined independently of the knower, and neither can the belief be defined independently of the environment.

Importantly, inquiry is an “experimental transaction” (Dewey in Smith, 2004: 137). Dewey (1985: 163) states that “[…] conceptions, theories and systems of thought […] are tools. As in the case of all tools, their value resides not in themselves but in their capacity to work shown in the consequences of their use”. Once these tools can no longer fulfill their purpose, new ones are required. Thus, any warranted assertion or ‘knowledge’ (or ‘truth’, as in positivism) established via pragmatic science settles a controversial issue, or answers a question, for the time being, until something appears to disturb the settlement, forcing inquiry to start anew (Cochran, 2002). Hence, pragmatism takes the preliminary character of scientific knowledge seriously.

For pragmatism, therefore, the organism acts purposefully, seeking to affect or control the constant changes ensuing by transaction, so that they may take one shape rather than another. That anticipation is knowing, i.e. inferring from current events the future consequences of actions.

The recognition that reflection is a genuine factor within experience and an indispensable factor in that control of the world which secures prosperous and significant expansion of experience undermines historic rationalism as assuredly as it abolishes the foundations of historic empiricism. (Dewey, 1917: 25)

What is more, because the knower engages the known with their biases, this includes norms and values as well. In fact, qua beliefs, these enable action and are inherent to human experience (Putnam, 2002). As such, even science, despite the best efforts of positivists, illustrates this point. To the extent that value is not taken to be synonymous with ethics, science has worked with values, epistemic values (Putnam, 2002).

These pragmatist philosophers did not refer only to the kind of normative judgments that we call “moral” or “ethical”; judgments of “coherence”, “simplicity,” “plausibility,” “reasonableness,” and of what Dirac famously called the beauty of a hypothesis, are all normative judgments in Charles Peirce’s sense, judgments of “what ought to be” in the case of reasoning. (Putnam, 2002: 31)

These terms, and many others on which science is necessarily based, are inherently normative. It is not possible to distinguish factual from evaluative elements (Putnam, 2002). These notions gain normative meaning in specific contexts of assessment (Bacon, 2012). Terms such as ‘disorder’ or ‘dysfunctional’ illustrate this forcefully within social work. Additionally, being goal oriented, practice inherently entails values, which cannot be separated from evidence, as assumed by positivism and EBP (Nevo and Slonim-Nevo, 2011).

Practitioners approach their work in light of what they know, inter alia the theories and skills learnt, and the values and customs of their society. As this background proves useful to address professional situations, it is a source of beliefs and habits, enabling practitioners to make sense of their clients and their world. Insofar it works, questioning it is unnecessary. Whenever cases challenge it, i.e. when that background fails to address the issue, practitioners face indeterminate situations for which inquiry is required. Here they experiment, resort to evidence and assess its pertinence along with other sources of insight, jointly with the client, to turn the situation at hand determinate. Such an approach resonates with what practitioners actually do, rejecting EBP’s five step process, and providing support for EIP (Nevo and Slonim-Nevo, 2011).

Habit, belief and action

“Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct” (Dewey, 1930: 125). As mentioned above, effective belief can become a habit. Nevertheless, habits are not just conditioned responses, as the arch-reflex wisdom would have them. Habits denote purposive strategies for goal achievement. Thus, accounting for habits enables the scrutiny of preferences, i.e. de gustibus est disputandum. For Dewey, habits are not repeated, mindless actions but predispositions formed by several acts (Hildebrand, 2008). Moreover, because they are more informative and fundamental to the human experience, ⁴ he privileges habits over choice. This challenges the dominant (positivist) approach to agency, rational choice and revealed preference, assumed by EBP’s RCTs. Indeed, habits make experience intelligible. Dewey (1930: 25, emphasis in original) states that:

[a]ll habits are demands for certain kinds of activities; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will. They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity. (Dewey, 1930: 25, emphasis in original)

An individual’s agency depends on their habits. They participate in the formation of preferences and the development of competences, abilities and skills. All of the these intervene in the creation of a person’s demands. Also, habits generate stability in the response to different stimuli. What a person values and how a person acts depend on habits. This includes the options that a person may find attainable or even that of which they are capable. Habits, thus, contribute to the explanation and understanding of action.

Just as preferences can change, so do habits. Conflict among habits or the frustration of habits to further action (i.e. an indeterminate situation) can prompt habits to change. When either situation ensues, ideas and impulses emerge in order to change the environment or to settle competing habits. An internal deliberation takes place in order to solve the issue and allow the continuity of action. Again, this account seems closer to actual practitioner experience.

The self and action

George H. Mead provides an account of this internal deliberation. He subscribed to Dewey’s notion of habit ⁵ and further developed it (Baldwin, 1988). Following the pragmatic tradition, action takes centre-stage. For Mead, all human action is social. Social interaction can be regarded as a process consisting of four stages, namely, indication, interpretation, formulation of response, and action. First, indication denotes the meaningful gestures that individuals transmit to each other. These can be verbal or non-verbal. Second, interpretation entails the imputation of meaning to the gestures conveyed by the receptor of the gesture. Third, the formulation of response refers to the conception and construction of a course of action in light of that interpretation. These stages can be particularly salient when there is a mismatch between the meaning intended by the transmitter in indication and the one generated by the receptor in interpretation. Fourth, action is the outcome of the process; the result of interpretation and the response to indication. Thus, action becomes indication itself and the process starts anew.

From habits to objects

Broadening the scope, human action is based on the meaning attributed not only to gestures but to objects. For Mead, these are understood as anything of which the individual is aware (Blumer, 2004). Accordingly, objects can have a plurality of features and characters. They can be material or not, real or not, be located within the person’s body or not, etc. In other words, if the person can refer to it, designate it or otherwise note it, it is an object for that person.

Importantly, this cognizance is produced socially and the object’s meanings are expressed in terms of action. People bring different parts of the environment to our attention. Unnoticed before, once they are introduced to us, they gain existence for us and become objects. By observing how others act, we learn how to act. People acting towards objects becomes an indication. Our observation and learning become interpretation. Emulating the actions of others relates to the formulation of a course of action and action itself. This is facilitated by our ability to take on different roles. One pretends to be the person acting on the object before performing one’s own action and during it. By so doing, the object gains meaning. Therefore, three conclusions become relevant: i) the meaning of objects is socially constructed; ii) that meaning is produced in terms of action; and, iii) all objects are social objects.

Since humans only act upon that which is an object for them, their environment consists of their objects. Moreover, the individual’s biases and designs of action are all incorporated in the meaning given to objects. Consequently, the study of human agency entails the study of the objects that make up a person’s world.

Significantly, because an object is anything of which a person is aware, the self can be an object. The self can be regarded as the object that the person is to themselves. ⁶ The internal deliberation alluded to above indicates that one can interact with oneself. As all interaction, self-interaction is based on social interaction. This is so because the latter allows taking the roles of others. Assuming others’ positions enables one to treat oneself as an object. The plurality of social interactions with different people under different circumstances allows the construction of a ‘generalized other’, that (beyond any particular role) gains an abstract character. Thus, regarding the self as an object takes the communicative nature of social interaction to the internal and individual level.

Moreover, the self is not only an object but a process. The phases of social interaction described above apply to self-interaction as well. One indicates something to oneself, interprets it, formulates a course of action, and finally acts. It is a continuous process characterized by two instances: the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. While the former denotes the human organism acting, the latter refers to the human organism reflecting on that action. The ‘I’, thus, captures human disposition to act, their impulse towards action, and the ‘Me’ is the generalized other (Mead, 1972). “The ‘I’ is the source of spontaneity and innovative actions. The ‘Me’ is the vehicle of self-regulation and social control” (Baldwin, 1988: 117).

Action, therefore, is a continuous process that takes two basic forms: habitual and creative acts (Joas, 1996). All action requires thinking, but some actions may demand more or less reflection than others. Both habits and creative actions can be objects, as one can act upon them. Furthermore, reflective or creative action needs habitual action upon which to build. As Dewey stated “thought which does not exist within ordinary habits lacks means of execution” (1930: 67). Hence, for pragmatism, to study human (trans)agency means to account for habits and objects.

Beyond measurement and meaning

Both causal explanation and interpretive understanding can be accounted for by pragmatism’s contribution to the treatment of evidence, without giving any a priori primacy to either. First, the inclusion of habits and objects of the knower as well as those of the subjects in inquiry can prove promising for the field, improving its external validity and explanatory power. This does not necessarily mean that it will allow greater generalization but rather a more accurate one. In fact, because factoring in additional information from all those involved (e.g. perceptions, meanings, reasons) including that of their contexts can demand considerable resources, small- to medium-N empirical exercises may be more accommodating of this approach. In this sense, expectations of causality may have to move from general to situational.

Second, interpretivist concerns can also be addressed. From this perspective, social work itself constitutes transaction. Therefore, an account of the relevant meanings of all participants in the process ought to be provided. This entails the inclusion of participatory research and practice, one of the criticisms raised against EBP (Humphries, 2003). Furthermore, acknowledging that social work activities constitute the world requires due treatment of the future changes that knowers and their undertakings can have on the subject of their research and vice versa. What is more, given the fact that much of this work seeks to engage wider audiences, such as policy makers and epistemic communities, pragmatism also implies awareness of how these activities constitute the wider world. Reflexivity, thus, is inherent to the pragmatic project.

Empirically, pragmatism favours the use of the scientific method (Sidorsky, 1977). This, however, does not translate into the endorsement of any particular technique or strategy. To the contrary, pragmatism opposes such expectations ascribing to this method two elements: experimental inquiry, and free and full discussion (Putnam, 2017). Coinciding with EIP, producing and consuming evidence entails adherence to plurality and fallibility. Whereas the former frees us to instrumentally use the insights from different disciplines and fields to generate warranted assertions, the latter enables the movement beyond the quest for certainty, inoculating ourselves from the Cartesian anxiety (Bernstein, 1983), and recognizing that those assertions are necessarily situational.

The consequences of inquiry, i.e. its future outcomes, determine the strategies to be employed. For certain purposes, methods associated with positivism may prove more useful. For others, the methods more readily linked to interpretivism may be more pertinent. For other cases still, the indeterminate situation may demand mixed- or multi-methods designs. What matters is that “[…] conceptions, theories and systems of thought […] are tools. As in the case of all tools, their value resides not in themselves but in their capacity to work shown in the consequences of their use” (Dewey, 1985: 163). Indeed, research methods do not belong to a specific philosophy of science. The choice of method is just that, a choice, and therefore, it answers to the preferences of the researcher/practitioner. Hence, pragmatism demands critical awareness of the biases inevitably influencing that choice as well.

Challenges and limitations

As beneficial as pragmatism could be for social work research and practice, the burden it places on scholars or practitioners must be acknowledged. Values provide an illuminating illustration. A corollary of the notion of transaction, the rejection of the fact-value dichotomy entails that values, much like beliefs, guide action and have provisional validity, i.e. they are not fixed but amenable to change depending on their ability to further action. The challenge for social workers is, at least, twofold. First, current professional ethical standards ought to be observed but also critically regarded since they can (and ought to) be improved as new (indeterminate) situations arise. The ends-in-view ⁷ for social workers is to contribute to those efforts. Second, clients also behave according to their values and preferences, and it is incumbent on social workers to factor them in the analysis and decision making. In this way, the incorporation of values can enrich the evidence available to guide more effective practice, which resonates with EIP.

Consequently, social workers must be mindful of their decisions and choices since producing evidence is not a matter of following a predetermined guide, nor is consuming it a matter of adopting what works elsewhere. To be sure, that mindfulness is currently exercised to different extents in the field. Nonetheless, reconsidering what evidence is, as pragmatism suggests, does entail a level of awareness and explicitness that seems to exceed that required by conventional (positivist) approaches. This is a skill that entails additional training and, before that, the recognition of pragmatism as an alternative philosophy of science, which can only be attained if it is duly scrutinized by the relevant communities.