Pragmatism is practical

The argument

To a pragmatist, none of the above philosophies's methods can single handedly provide answers to every research problem. By being uninhibited by the limits and restrictions inherent to the other philosophies, pragmatists use whatever means at their disposal with a view to advance their field of study. They begin with a research question and attempt to determine the best possible strategies to answer it. Pragmatists aren't inherently subjectivist or objectivist; their approach depends on the research question. For the same reason, they may opt to use a large number of sources or choose to do case studies.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Pragmatism's 'use whatever works' flexibility is also its principal weakness, so 'practical' does not amount to 'the best research philosophy'. Without a settled methodological commitment, a pragmatist can combine objectivist and subjectivist assumptions within a single project — assumptions that carry incompatible criteria for what counts as evidence, validity and inference — which risks incoherence and produces results that are harder to appraise, compare or replicate than those of a consistent paradigm. A method chosen ad hoc, question by question, can also blur the transparency that lets others judge how a conclusion was reached. And the argument's founding move — that no single philosophy answers every research problem — applies to pragmatism itself: choosing means to fit a question does not escape making epistemological commitments, it merely leaves them implicit and shifting rather than declared, so pragmatism cannot actually stand outside the very frameworks it claims to transcend. Being adaptable is a genuine virtue in some applied contexts, but it is not self-evidently superior to a disciplined paradigm, and the argument establishes convenience rather than epistemic strength.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Using 'whatever means best answer' a question can blend incompatible epistemological assumptions — objectivist and subjectivist criteria for evidence differ — risking incoherence and results that are hard to appraise or replicate. [Rejecting P3] Declining to be inherently subjectivist or objectivist does not avoid those commitments; every method embeds assumptions about evidence, so pragmatism cannot fully sidestep the choices it claims to transcend.