This work runs counter to the traditional interpretations of Peirce's philosophy by eliciting an inherent strand of pragmatic pluralism that is embedded in the very core of his thought and that weaves his various doctrines into a systematic ...

Unique in both perspective and approach, this is the first book to use classical American pragmatism as an ethical framework for dealing with ethical issues in business. The book first explores ethical theory from both the traditional and pragmatic perspectives. Then, using the pragmatic perspective, discusses the nature of the corporation and its relationship to society, the various environments in which business functions, and specific issues in the contemporary marketplace and workplace.

At the heart of entrepreneurship are imagination, creativity, novelty, and sensitivity. It takes these qualities to develop a new product or service and bring it to market, to envision the possible impacts a new product may make and come up with novel and creative solutions to problems that may arise. These qualities go to make up what could be called the spirit of entrepreneurship, a spirit that involves the ability to handle the experimental nature of entrepreunerial activity. These same qualities (...) are crucial for moral decision making, and an ethical approach which emphasizes imagination, creativity, and has an experimental thrust is much better adapted to the entrepreneurial activity and much more relevant to the unique situations that entrepreneurs face. In this sense, the process approach to ethics developed in this article is a unifying framework that brings together the activity of entrepreneurship and moral decision making. (shrink)

Using classical American pragmatism, the authors provide a philosophical framework for rethinking the nature of the corporation--how it is embedded in its natural, technological, cultural, and international environments, emphasizing throughout its pervasive relational and moral dimensions. They explore the relationship of this framework to other contemporary business ethics perspectives, as well as its implications for moral leadership in business and business education.

. Atomic individualism is embedded in most definitions of stakeholder theory, and as a result, stakeholders are not integral to the basic identity of the corporation which is considered to be independent of, and separate from, its stakeholders. Feminist theory has been suggested as a way of developing a more relational view of the corporation and its stakeholders, but it lacks a systematically developed conceptual framework for undergirding its own insights. Pragmatic philosophy is offered as a way of providing this (...) theoretical undergirding for . a relational understanding of the firm and its stakeholders. (shrink)

Unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis.

Integrating "ethics all the way through" an organization suggests that the issue of moral agency and the corporation be reconsidered. Is the corporation a moral agent in some sense or is it no more than the people who are a part of the organization? Views which stress the role of the individual lose sight of the whole corporate entity, and views which think of the corporation as a collective lose sight of the individual. A view which rejects both these alternatives (...) sees the corporation as a type of community where there is a dynamic tension between the corporation as a whole and the individuals who are part of the organization. This view has implications relative to the focus of efforts to integrate ethics throughout an organization. (shrink)

Peirce’s pragmatic stress on meaning in terms of habits of response is, of course, well known. However, the language in which it is usually expressed tends too often to conflate its epistemic and ontological dimensions, thereby hiding from view its full systematic significance. The following discussion will focus on the emergence of such meanings as epistemic relational structures which embody the characteristics of the dynamics of organism-environment interaction in their very internal structure and which lead outward toward the universe, providing (...) an experienced content which is at once epistemic and ontological. (shrink)

People who teach business ethics seem locked between two general approaches: an applied philosophy approach that emphasizes the application of abstract ethical theories and principles to specific cases, and the case method approach that leaves the students without any more general theoretical framework with which to approach ethical issues. Classical American Pragmatism, understood as a school of philosophical thought, links these two approaches by providing a new grounding for moral theory in which moral rules are understood as working hypotheses abstracted (...) from concrete situations and moralreasoning demands the return to concrete situations as the foundation for moral decision making that is inherently contextual. Thus moral decision making is bottom up rather than top down, and a sense of moral rightness comes not from the indoctrination of abstract principles but from attunement to the way in which moral beliefs and practices must be rooted naturally in the very conditions of human existence. (shrink)

The empirical-normative split in business ethics is another manifestation of the fact-value problem that has existed betweenscience and philosophy for several centuries. This paper explores classical American pragmatism’s understanding of the fact-valuedistinction, showing how it offers a different way of understanding the empirical business ethics–normative business ethics issue.Unfolding the pragmatic perspective on this issue involves a focus on its understanding of both the nature of empirical inquiry and thenature of normative inquiry.

C. I. Lewis was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. In this book, Sandra B. Rosenthal explores Lewis’s philosophical vision, and links his thought to the traditions of classical American pragmatism. Tracing Lewis’s influences, she explains the central concepts informing his thinking and how he developed a unique and practical vision of the human experience. She shows how Lewis contributed to the enrichment and expansion of pragmatism, opening new paths of constructive dialogue with other traditions. This book (...) will become a standard reference for readers who want to know more about one of American philosophy’s most distinguished minds. (shrink)

Introduction CLASSICAL American pragmatism represents a historical period in American philosophy, spanning a particular time frame and including the ...

This paper will build on a recent article appearing in the Harvard Business Review that blamed the alleged crisis in management education on the scientific model that has been adopted as the sole means of gaining knowledge about human behavior and organizations. The solution, they argue, is for business schools to realize that business management is not a scientific discipline but a profession, and deal with the things a professional education requires. We will expand on this article and discuss its (...) implications by looking at the scientific model from a philosophical perspective and dealing with the issue of whether management is a profession. Our discussion of these issues has implications for our understanding of business in society and the design of the business school curriculum. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In the philosophic world today, and especially within the context of the emerging American scene, pragmatism and phenomenology can each ...

The current literature in business ethics is tending toward an unacknowledged moral pluralism, with all the problems this position entails. An adequate moral pluralism cannot be achieved by a synthesis of existing theoretical alternatives for moral action. Rather, what is needed is a radical reconstruction of the understanding of the moral situation that undercuts some of the traditional dichotomies, provides a solid philosophical grounding which is inherently pluralistic, and offers a new understanding of what it is to think morally. The (...) philosophical position of American pragmatism, as briefly sketched in this paper, offers one such possible reconstruction. (shrink)

A good deal of attention is beginning to be focused on Peirce’s understanding of perceptual judgments and the issue of foundations, and ultimately the nature of the percipuum is central to this issue. An examination of Peirce’s understanding of the dual senses of the percept, the perceptual judgment, and the percipuum, as well as the role of the ponecept and ponecipuum, in the logic of perceptual awareness, reveals the radical nature of his rejection of foundationalism. It will be seen that (...) Peirce uses the term “percipuum” in two different senses, a wide sense and a narrow sense, highlighting two corresponding senses of the perceptual judgment, and that what is “given” at the most fundamental level of perceptual awareness is in fact a “taken”, incorporating both the nature of the taking and the nature of what is taken. For Peirce, perceptual facts at their very primordial core emerge neither from mind alone nor from the dynamic reality of the universe alone, but rather from the interaction of the two which constitutes experience. (shrink)

This panel study assessed changes in ethical ideology and beliefs about the societal function of media over the course of undergraduate communication education in Singapore. First, students' agreement with the ethical principles of truth telling, independence, and accountability increased. Second, change in agreement with the ethical principle of minimizing harm was negatively related to change in justification of contentious newsgathering methods. Third, belief that the media should function as a watchdog increased and that it should serve national development decreased. Change (...) in these variables was inversely correlated. We relate these findings to global contexts and make recommendations for curriculum development. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Corporate social responsibility Corporate social responsiveness Public policy The development of business ethics New developments in business ethics Conclusion.

Many theoretical developments in the business and society field do not pay enough attention to the policy environment in which business functions and through which corporate behavior is largely shaped to respond to social problems. Part of this problem may be due to the lack of a firm philosophical foundation for public policy providing legitimacy for the concept in relation to the market system. American pragmatism offers such a foundation and overcomes many of the tensions between the market and public (...) policy by puffing the concept of the individual and community in proper perspective. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Selfhood and community Value The normative‐empirical split Environmental ethics.

This essay compares and contrasts pragmatic naturalism with the more well known position of epistemological naturalism on several pivotal issues, in the process offering a pragmatic critique of the latter. It highlights their common rejection of both foundationalism and a priori methods and their positive claims that: what needs examination is not our concept of knowledge but knowledge itself; knowledge must be understood as tied to the world and as a natural phenomenon to be examined in its natural setting; the (...) epistemic endeavor involves unifying its three traditional projects of giving an account of what knowledge is, explaining how knowledge is possible, and providing useful epistemic advice, thus involving normative considerations; and the method of gaining knowledge in general is continuous with the method of science. Yet, there are very great divergences between the two naturalisms concerning the answers offered, and these are explored and evaluated in the development of the essay. (shrink)

This collection provides a thorough grounding in the philosophy of American pragmatism by examining the views of four principal thinkers - Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead - on issues of central and enduring importance to life in human society. Pragmatism emerged as a characteristically American response to an inheritance of British empiricism. Presenting a radical reconception of the nature of experience, pragmatism represents a belief that ideas are not merely to be contemplated but must (...) be put into action, tested and refined through experience. At the same time, the American pragmatists argued for an emphasis on human community that would offset the deep-seated American bias in favor of individualism. Far from being a relic of the past, pragmatism offers a dynamic and substantive approach to questions of human conduct, social values, scientific inquiry, religious belief, and aesthetic experience that lie at the center of contemporary life. This volume is an invaluable introduction to a school of thought that remains vital, instructive, and provocative. (shrink)

Offers a pragmatically oriented reconstruction of the central issues of time.

To understand the significance of Peirce’s self-proclaimed idealism within the context of his metaphysical system, it must be viewed not only in terms of the modifications he makes, but also–perhaps more so–in terms of the alternatives against which they are pitted, for frequently it is his understanding of the shortcomings of these other positions which leads him to find idealism so enticing. Indeed, Peirce’s most clear-cut assertions of idealism arise from a rejection of two other positions which he falsely thinks (...) to exhaust the possibilities, for the alternatives from which he begins are rooted in a tradition of substance and kinds of “stuff,” while his search for an answer stems from an emerging framework of process and function. While Peirce is not an idealist, his flirtation with idealism was a vital force in shaping the character of his philosophy as it moved on to novel terrain. Yet, if he is seen as wedded too closely to idealism, this novel terrain is lost from view. Thus, his self-proclaimed idealism yields both a tool for bringing to light important distinctions and an obstacle which stands in the way of understanding his ultimate commitment to a novel pragmatic synthesis which undercuts the numerous and often contradictory traditional labels by which he attempts to articulate his emerging position. (shrink)

Peirce stresses that the pragmatist qua pragmatist must embrace realism as opposed to nominalism. He offers as well “proofs” of realism which are open to various criticisms. Within the framework of his pragmatic vision, the experiential sense of realism is inseparable from the functioning of habit in the flow of time. What is being verified by experimental testing is, ultimately, not a particular scientific law, nor scientific laws in general, but rather the common sense expectation of predictive reliability rooted in (...) the primitive epistemic “feel” of real potentiality, a belief which is dubitable in principle, and which is, in fact, often doubted at the abstract, reflective levels of science, logic, and philosophy, but which, at the level of rudimentary perceptual experience is fundamental to our very sense of our world, and is well verified by the continual availability of our perceptual world. The concrete functioning of habit provides, epistemically, the conceptual counterpart of the real lawfulness held to exist in the world, and provides, ontologically, an example of this real lawfulness. Peirce’s dispositional theory of meaning leads to a metaphysics of realism as opposed to a nominalism, a realism not of eternal essences but a “process realism” in which there are real modes of behavior which govern what occurs. (shrink)

In the last few years, some attempts have been made to overcome the disparity between environmental ethics and business ethics. However, as the situation now stands the various positions in business ethics have not incorporated any well-developed theoretical foundation for environmental issues, and conversely, environmental ethics is failing to capture an audience that could profit greatly from utilizing its theoretical insights and research. In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for business ethics and environmental ethics that (...) can further the dialogue that has recently begun, perhaps bringing it to a deeper theoretical level. (shrink)

Scientists know that human activities, primarily fossil fuel combustion, are causing Earth’s temperature to increase. Yet in 2021, only 60% of the US population understood that human activities are the primary cause of global warming. We experimentally test whether information about the human causes of global warming influences Americans’ beliefs and concerns about global warming and support for climate policies. We find that communicating information about the human-causes of global warming increases public understanding that global warming is human-caused. This information, (...) both alone and with additional information about climate impacts and policy solutions, also increases public concern about global warming and support for climate policies, although the effects on climate concern and policy support are smaller. Importantly, the treatment effects are consistent across political party, with no backlash effects among Republicans. This suggests that when informed about climate change causes, impacts and solutions, most Americans can update their own climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support. (shrink)

In both the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, the rejection of the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction leads to a rejection of the alternatives of realism or idealism as well. In their respective denials of such an existential or ontological gap between appearance or phenomena and the ontologically real, they each establish a fundamental intentional unity between man and world which cannot be understood within the framework of realism or of idealism and which reveals deeply rooted (...) affinities between the two positions. (shrink)