Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Zsolt Virágos: Some Observations on Myth and Practical' Pragmatism in American Culture

argued that the Constitution expressly enumerates all the powers belonging to the federal government and nowhere was the government empowered to set up a bank. Hamilton's plan, however, was still accepted and a precedent was established. In hardly more than a decade, when the Louisiana Purchase was coming up, it was Jefferson who was willing to yield to urgent pleas to stretch meanings in interpreting the President's treaty-making power to include the right of acquiring territory. Likewise, the various compromises from 1820 onward between the North and the South on the constitutional rights pertaining to the institution of slavery, as well as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were, in a way, exercises in the explication of meaning. A great number of similar instances could be cited. Diverse interpretations of one and the same thing, the question of the plausibility of interpretation, the apparent resilience of the techniques involved were obviously indicative not only of rival interests, competing norms and demands of conduct but also of a kind of intellectual and epistemological uncertainty concerning the relativistic nature of beliefs and the cavalier treatment of truth. At least this is how the perception of the average citizen may have registered his social environment. Perhaps I am not oversimplifying the issue in suggesting that in the light of the above it might be legitimate to consider the pragmatic theory of truth as a kind of philosophical rescue operation, a sort of unitive strategy, or as a socially conditioned philosophical manoeuvre. The pragmatists even may have cherished the hope that philosophy would participate in the main enterprise of human affairs. It should be added, however, that not everyone who subscribes to the pragmatist theory of truth understands or is interested in the conceptual apparatus of postulates, premisses, or ostensibly watertight validation processes. In the popular consciousness pragmatism has undergone the inevitable process of fragmentation and (oversimplification and it has, in the popular idiom survived in piecemeal fashion, in catchphrases like "getting practical results," "getting things done," or thought of as an idea conveying a sense of business ethos, a call to action involving unprincipled expediency. Yet another widely shared view is that pragmatism is a 143