Families

Pragmatists

Physicalism, created meaning, and the priority of the community.

Pragmatists treat shared purposes as things people build in a material world. The name does not mean “whatever works,” and it does not mean a political party. It means that a common project can be meaningful without being written into the universe, and that the building is done with others. Members still disagree about the role of principle, prediction, and proof.

This is not a measure of personality, mental health, intelligence, or character.

• MECDCCCooperative Empiricist

  Shared purposes are built in a material world, guided by what can be checked and by the results the building produces.

• MECLCCGuild Experimenter

  Collective projects in a material world are justified by their fruits, and they remain projects people could have refused.

• MEDDCCRule-Keeping Builder

  Shared practices are built under rules that a better result does not simply repeal, in a world taken to be physical and causally ordered.

• MEDLCCVoluntary Engineer

  A joint life can still be chosen inside material conditions, without letting a better result dissolve every obligation.

• MRCDCCDesigning Member

  Shared arrangements are reasoned out in a physical world and judged by their results, with the knowledge that the purposes are made.

• MRCLCCCo-Author of Ends

  People can invent a common purpose together, justify it by reasons and results, and still have been able to refuse it.

• MRDDCCPrincipled Planner

  A community authors its projects and remains subject to duties and causes it cannot wish away.

• MRDLCCChartered Associate

  Associates can found a way of life, remain able to have done otherwise, and still owe constraints that results do not cancel.