Below is my part of an exchange I had today that I genericized/redacted for a wider audience.

Pragmatism is such an over-used term, applying to so many different approaches. Drawing proper distinctions between the approaches likely requires more nunacing than I am competent to provide and the nuances could cut across so many different categories. With those caveats, allow me to oversimplify anyway and don't take it as gospel.

The category that I especially have in mind might best be imagined as existing on a continuum that deals with one's attitude toward metaphysics. Let's characterize the possible attitudes with antipathy calibrated as a -10, apathy as a 0 and sympathy as a +10. By my reading, Rorty would come out somewhere near the antipathetic pole and Peirce near the sympathetic pole. James might be closer to the apathetic node, maybe not because he would have been so very ambivalent about metaphysics but moreso because he was busying himself with other concerns, you know, that had cash value (for individuals, psychologically and religiously). Dewey would fallout somewhere between Rorty and James, and, like James, he was sort of preoccupied with practical concerns (for society, psychologically and politically).

I'm not really sure what number between -10 and +10 that I would assign myself but pretty much lean toward the sympathetic pole. One should not confuse my sympathy with metaphysics, in general, with any given metaphysic, in particular. On that score, I am almost a Zero, ambivalent to be sure even if not apathetic. I suppose this is consistent with my being the Nuncio of Nuance, always critiquing the critiques of critiques, not for want of critical thinking, resisting unwarranted rushes to closure.

In my view, every metaphysical system suffers fatal flaws, as does every philosophical system. The most enduring and celebrated of these systems, for me, are major hypotheses, each one answering the critiques of all the others, but all still inescapably riddled with fatal wounds, mostly in the form of paradox (not the veridical, falsidical and conditional varieties that can resolve with varying degrees of difficulty, but, rather, the true antinomial types that reveal genuine problems with our notions of truth and description, genuine limitations of deductive reasoning in classical logic). Whenever a metaphysician opens a hermeneutical window, reality slams an epistemological door. I'm always looking for that system pregnant with the least paradox, clinging ever so firmly to the principle of noncontradiction because it works and not because I can prove it or rationally demonstrate even the existence of other minds, primate or otherwise.

Like scientific hypotheses, in my view, philosophical and metaphysical hypotheses (and theological hypotheses) are to be tested in the laboratory of life, empirically evaluated in the crucible of experience. Pragmatically, then, it seems to me that we choose our axioms based on what works for humanity, balancing competing values, which are emergent.

1) This is a nonfoundational epistemology that employs a contrite fallibilism (also, for me, a holistic epistemology invested in manifold and diverse epistemic capacities). 2) This is an essential pragmatism that employs a nuanced empiricism. 3) This has yielded, for me, only hypothetical ontologies, all with varying degrees of modeling power for different aspects of reality. 4) In my God hypothesis, whatever would be said of both a putative creator and of creatures is predicated equivocally and whatever would be said of God, alone, would be univocally predicated. As a result, those metaphysical hypotheses of mine, which are distinctly theological, while certainly metaphysical by definition, are going to be pretty much autonomous from those that deal with cosmology and ontology. 5) Ergo, when it comes to whether the universe is a multiverse or not, infinite or finite, or whether consciousness can be accounted for by any of dozens of ontologies, I'm all ears. I'm from Missouri, too. Show me. And whatever the case may be, it will serve to further illuminate the attributes of a hypothetical God by improving on the manifold, varied and equivocally predicated analogues between the creator and creatures, while having no bearing on the univocally predicated essential nature of God.

But back to the normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. Some have especially noted that we have a novel ability to symbolically experience our primate minds and that one of the core contributions of culture is the encoding of moral ideals. I find this compelling and it seems to no less apply to logical and aesthetical ideals, the very ideals that our minds experience as a priori axioms vis a vis the normative sciences. And, in a sense then, they are, but not pulled from some platonic realm, rather bootstrapped from an ongoing process of rational reflection returning again and again to experience, empirically and pragmatically choosing the adaptive over the maladaptive, the functional over the dysfunctional, within the constraints of Hefner�s determinedness and embodiedment, nonetheless enjoying a significant range of motion gifted by our novel semiotic capacities and experienced as freedom and autopoiesis. This is not to deny their transcendent significance or other putative sources of receiving noetical, aesthetical and ethical truth, only to comment on one of the modes, not excluding connaturality, intuition of being, natural mysticism, philosophical contemplation or infused contemplation (only, re: the last instance, we are restricting this consideration to natural theology).

This all seems replete with an intrinsic telos that provides at least a minimalist ontological - emergent reality, exerting a very efficacious downward causation. Still, a pragmatic realism, per H. Putnam, implies that our ontological commitments depend on the conceptual frameworks in which they are made. This conceptual relativity isn't arbitrary and any commitments made for this or that phenomenon under study is to be challenged and critiqued by alternate frameworks and their commitments, such an approach as that I previously described regarding my own openness to otherwise seemingly disparate philosophical and metaphysical systems.