As my username suggests, I'm a fan of the philosophical pragmatism of Richard Rorty as well as William James and others. Are there many EAs who share that view?
Pragmatism demands some things that might seem at odds with EA: it rejects the notion that we can reason our way toward capital-T Truth. The idea of true belief as correspondence to Reality is discarded.
But it also has features that seem to me very compatible with EA. It reorients truth toward usefulness and in so doing centers moral goals, which are central to the EA project as well. In effect, pragmatists make no distinction between epistemology and "applied epistemology"; for them all epistemology is applied.
Pragmatism asks that reasons, arguments, and philosophies make a practical difference -- that they help us achieve goals. That should be a way of thinking that's amenable to a movement that focuses on doing the most good possible and then asks how to do that.
So, are many EAs philosophical pragmatists?
Thanks for this. Here's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's first paragraph:
"Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism
I'd say pragmatism is as much a criticism of certain directions in philosophy as anything. It's a method of asking of philosophical distinctions "what difference would that make." But instead of turning toward skepticism it seeks to reorient philosophy and reasoning toward the fulfillment of human goals.