When he said that the whole meaning of a (clear) conception consists in the entire set of its practical consequences, he had in mind that a meaningful conception must have some sort of experiential "cash value", must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), Hackett Publishing 1981: ISBN 0-915145-05-7, Dover 1995: ISBN 0-486-28270-8

"There can be no difference that doesn't make a difference."— Pragmatism (1907), p. 45

Aristotle called practical wisdom phronesis. It's the ability to discern what works in particular situations, not through abstract principle alone, but through experience and judgement. It's knowing what to do, and when, in specific circumstances.

This is why I count myself as a Pragmatist. It's a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for problem-solving and action, not for trying to create a mirror of reality. At its core is an understanding that you cannot know the world without having a perspective. This does not make all perspectives somehow “equally valid” but instead means that you should test your approaches against reality, observe what works, revise what doesn't, and gradually get better at navigating the world as it actually is.

practical truth

For intellectuals of this sort, even when they were writing learned tomes in the solitude of their studies, there was always a living community before their eyes

absolute gem of a book, I use it for my compilers class:https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-parsing

It really slows down your test suite accessing the disk.So yes, in principle it slows down your tests. There is a "school of testing" where developer should isolate the layer responsible for retrieving state and just set some state in memory and test functionality (as if Repository pattern). The thing is Rails is a tightly coupled with implementation logic of state retrieval on core level and prefers "school of testing" in which you couple logic with state retrial to some degree.Good example of this is how models are tested in Rails. You could just build entire test suite calling `FactoryBot.build` and never ever use `FactoryBot.create` and stub method all around and your tests will be lighting fast (like 5s to run your entire test suite). This is highly unproductive to achieve and I failed many times trying to achieve that because I was spending more time maintaining my tests then writing something productive for business.Or you can took more pragmatic route and save database record where is too difficult to just 'build' the factory (e.g. Controller tests, association tests etc)Same I would say for saving the file to the Disk. Yes you are right You could just "not save the file to disk" and save few milliseconds. But at the same time you will in future stumble upon scenarios where your tests are not passing because the file is not there (e.g. file processing validations) Is it really worth it ? I never worked on a project where saving file to a disk would slow down tests significantly enough that would be an issue (and I work for company where core business is related to file uploading) Especially now that we have SSD drives in every laptop/server it's blazing fast so at best you would save 1 seconds for entire test suite (given you call FactoryBot traits to set/store file where it make sense. Not when every time you build an object.)

an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population

Working is better than perfect.

It is about balancing the twin needs of writing good software, and writing any software at all.

let's define pragmatism as doing what is practical, regardless of how you things are supposed to be or should be

When your idea matches your confidence level, good things happen.

Earlier, I have criticized Facebook for not anticipating the ethical problems with Facebook live and for its general approach of trying things out without much ethical forethought. But wouldn’t a pragmatist argue that because they are charting into new territory, digital innovators are more likely to make ethical mistakes giving the lack of existing normative framework?  This pragmatic defense only has limited power though, as there are general guiding ethical norms and principles in place already.  It is of course true that (some of) these norms might be subject to change in the digital environment and that sometimes our existing frameworks are ill-equipped to deal with new moral dilemmas. However, this does not excuse some of the more egregious ethical lapses we have seen recently, which were violations of well-known and accepted moral guidelines.

This approach, I believe, works well for digital ethics, where we try to articulate rules that govern how we interact with each other through digital technologies. For example, when social media emerged, there was no fixed rule about when it is appropriate to tag someone in a picture and when it isn’t. So we figured out a netiquette and ethical norms as we were going along, based on experience, existing norms, insights from experts etc. There still might be areas of disagreement, but I would argue that overall we have come to an understanding of what is acceptable and what isn’t on this issue, and these norms are passed on to new users of social media.

Phillip Kitcher, in the introduction of The Ethical Project describes the project of this pragmatic naturalism as follows: “Ethics emerges as a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished. We, collectively, made it up, and have developed, refined, and distorted it, generation by generation. Ethics should be understood as a project --the ethical project-- in which we have been engaged for most of our history as a species.” This a functionalist view sees ethics as a set of guidelines that make communal living possible. A successful ethical system is one that can fulfill this function.

For a pragmatist, documenting this change and questioning what perpetuated it in order to better understand our current norm is the more interesting endeavor. From this understanding, ethical guidelines can be crafted, but the descriptive process precedes the prescriptive one.

According to pragmatics, our attitudes and norms change in response to societal changes. For example, in an episode of Mad Men a guest at a party could be seen slapping a child that wasn’t his. It was one of the many (and one of the milder) examples in which the show’s creators’ reminded their audience that in the 1960s different rules governed social interactions.

In daily language, the word pragmatic is often used pejoratively, to describe someone with a lack of principles (or character) who will let the situation, rather than a firm moral compass, guide her actions. But in the philosophical sense, pragmatism refers to an orientation towards ethics that isn’t occupying itself with abstract concepts such as “truth,” “right” and “wrong” or with coming up with all-encompassing ethical theories. Instead it focuses on praxis rather than theory and sees the role of the ethicist more to “de-scribe” norms as they develop than to “pre-scribe” them. 

rhetorical character in the broadest sense, that is, by theirselection, design, and objectives