Closing Remarks

Summary

This book has been an attempt to inject more pragmatism into the philosophy of science, and into epistemology and metaphysics especially as they bear on the philosophy of science. From a pragmatist standpoint I have proposed renewed conceptions of knowledge, truth and reality as notions that are fully meaningful in practice. I have also wanted to put pragmatism into a broader framework, namely that of humanism. When applied to the philosophy of science, humanism means treating science as a human enterprise, undertaken by people in order to meet people’s needs – intellectual, material and social. As explained in Section 1.6, by ‘humanism’ I do not mean human chauvinism. For non-human agents there will be different pragmatist epistemologies, which are bound to differ significantly from human pragmatist epistemology. In my view, that only enhances the need for us to understand the nature of our own human ways of knowing, before and while we attempt to understand other kinds of knowing. This humanist framing shapes my interpretation of pragmatism, which focuses on two main aspects.