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Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.

Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."

Origins

Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.

The word "pragmatic" has existed in English since the 1500s, a word borrowed from French and ultimately derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma, meaning business, deed or act, is a noun derived from the verb prassein, to do. The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series—including "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), and especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878)—as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt, and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics.

Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing a conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. Schiller's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript, he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller and, in a 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce regarded his own views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them about the falsity of necessitarianism and about the reality of generals and habits understood in terms of potential concrete effects even if unactualized.

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Core tenets
A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:

 * Epistemology (justification): a coherentist theory of justification that rejects the claim that all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief. Coherentists hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundationalist theories of justification.
 * Epistemology (truth): a deflationary or pragmatic theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement while the latter is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement attribute the property of useful-to-believe to such a statement.
 * Metaphysics: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content.
 * Philosophy of science: an instrumentalist and scientific anti-realist view that a scientific concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.
 * Philosophy of language: an anti-representationalist view that rejects analyzing the semantic meaning of propositions, mental states, and statements in terms of a correspondence or representational relationship and instead analyzes semantic meaning in terms of notions like dispositions to action, inferential relationships, and/or functional roles (e.g. behaviorism and inferentialism). Not to be confused with pragmatics, a sub-field of linguistics with no relation to philosophical pragmatism.
 * Additionally, forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verificationism, and a Quinean naturalist metaphilosophy are all commonly elements of pragmatist philosophies. Many pragmatists are epistemological relativists and see this to be an important facet of their pragmatism (e.g. Joseph Margolis), but this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such relativism to be seriously misguided (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).

Anti-reification of concepts and theories
Dewey in The Quest for Certainty criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": Philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize that these are nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "ultimate Being" of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the action of concrete thinking.

David L. Hildebrand summarized the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back onto experience."

Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism
From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. Pragmatists criticized the former for its a priorism, and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known.

In 1868, C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around. At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general. This is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism.

Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. W.V. Quine, who was instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized", also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry.

Reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism
Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a "God's-eye-view", this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes's famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition.

Theory of truth and epistemology
Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam later called metaphysical realism), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with.

Many of James' best-turned phrases—"truth's cash value" and "the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking" —were taken out of context and caricatured in contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with practical utility is true. William James wrote:

In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle.

The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? "Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing". Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In James's pragmatism nothing practical or useful is held to be necessarily true nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with the facts (and is therefore not true).

In other fields
While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views.

Philosophy of science
In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science.

One of C. I. Lewis' main arguments in Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (1929) was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of multiple modal logics is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this.

Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf Carnap. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement do not often refer to them.

W. V. Quine's paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not a priori truths but synthetic statements.

Logic
Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy. Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book Formal Logic. In this sequel, Logic for Use, Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in Formal Logic. What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.

Whereas Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. I. Lewis. C. S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic.

Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work).

Metaphysics
James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality. Radical empiricism, or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.

William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming:

F. C. S. Schiller's first book Riddles of the Sphinx was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation.

In the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing atoms) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value).

Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about the limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena.

Philosophy of mind
Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1929) and, half a century later, Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category.

Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question.

Ethics
Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the good reasons approach. The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle.

William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions.

Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals", he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved.

Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself.

Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience. An additional implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them.

During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering (see designer baby) garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of a theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics. An anthology published by the MIT Press titled Pragmatic Bioethics included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.

A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan's Making Morality. Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent.

Aesthetics
John Dewey's Art as Experience, based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard University, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience (IEP). Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given.

Philosophy of religion
Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in A Common Faith and the latter in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities. Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds.

Joseph Margolis in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness: things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist".

Education
Pragmatic pedagogy is an educational philosophy that emphasizes teaching students knowledge that is practical for life and encourages them to grow into better people. American philosopher John Dewey is considered one of the main thinkers of the pragmatist educational approach.

Neopragmatism
Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers that incorporate important insights of, and yet significantly diverge from, the classical pragmatists. This divergence may occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in conceptual formation: for example, conceptual pragmatist C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey; neopragmatist Richard Rorty disliked Peirce.

Important analytic pragmatists include early Richard Rorty (who was the first to develop neopragmatist philosophy in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, and Donald Davidson. Brazilian social thinker Roberto Unger advocates for a radical pragmatism, one that "de-naturalizes" society and culture, and thus insists that we can "transform the character of our relation to social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just to change, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that comprise them". Late Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are closer to Continental thought.

Neopragmatist thinkers who are more loyal to classical pragmatism include Sidney Hook and Susan Haack (known for the theory of foundherentism). Many pragmatist ideas (especially those of Peirce) find a natural expression in the decision-theoretic reconstruction of epistemology pursued in the work of Isaac Levi. Nicholas Rescher advocates his version of methodological pragmatism, based on construing pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its evidentiation. Rescher is also a proponent of pragmatic idealism.

Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. With the advent of postanalytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, many philosophers were influenced by pragmatist thought without necessarily publicly committing themselves to that philosophical school. Daniel Dennett, a student of Quine's, falls into this category, as does Stephen Toulmin, who arrived at his philosophical position via Wittgenstein, whom he calls "a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind". Another example is Mark Johnson whose embodied philosophy shares its psychologism, direct realism and anti-cartesianism with pragmatism. Conceptual pragmatism is a theory of knowledge originating with the work of the philosopher and logician Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the 1929 book Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge.

French pragmatism is attended with theorists such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Michel Crozier, Luc Boltanski, and Laurent Thévenot. It often is seen as opposed to structural problems connected to the French critical theory of Pierre Bourdieu. French pragmatism has more recently made inroads into American sociology and anthropology as well.

Philosophers John R. Shook and Tibor Solymosi said that "each new generation rediscovers and reinvents its own versions of pragmatism by applying the best available practical and scientific methods to philosophical problems of contemporary concern".

Legacy and contemporary relevance
In the 20th century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics; however, logical positivism doesn't stress action as pragmatism does. The pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection.

Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character (although Peirce's pragmatism is not nominalist ) and because it takes the broader functioning of language in an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations between language and world.

Pragmatism has ties to process philosophy. Much of the classical pragmatists' work developed in dialogue with process philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, who aren't usually considered pragmatists because they differ so much on other points. Nonetheless, philosopher Donovan Irven argues there's a strong connection between Henri Bergson, pragmatist William James, and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre regarding their theories of truth.

Behaviorism and functionalism in psychology and sociology also have ties to pragmatism, which is not surprising considering that James and Dewey were both scholars of psychology and that Mead became a sociologist.

Pragmatism emphasizes the connection between thought and action. Applied fields like public administration, political science, leadership studies, international relations, conflict resolution, and research methodology have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism in their field. Often this connection is made using Dewey and Addams's expansive notion of democracy.

Effects on social sciences
In the early 20th century, Symbolic interactionism, a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, as well as that of Peirce and William James.

Increasing attention is being given to pragmatist epistemology in other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with divisive debates over the status of social scientific knowledge.

Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach that is both pluralist and practical.

Effects on public administration
The classical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce has influenced research in the field of public administration. Scholars claim classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of public administration. At the most basic level, public administrators are responsible for making programs "work" in a pluralistic, problems-oriented environment. Public administrators are also responsible for the day-to-day work with citizens. Dewey's participatory democracy can be applied in this environment. Dewey and James' notion of theory as a tool, helps administrators craft theories to resolve policy and administrative problems. Further, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists.

Which pragmatism (classical pragmatism or neo-pragmatism) makes the most sense in public administration has been the source of debate. The debate began when Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey's notion of the Community of Inquiry. Hugh Miller objected to one element of the community of inquiry (problematic situation, scientific attitude, participatory democracy): scientific attitude. A debate that included responses from a practitioner, an economist, a planner, other public administration scholars, and noted philosophers  followed. Miller and Shields also responded.

In addition, applied scholarship of public administration that assesses charter schools, contracting out or outsourcing, financial management, performance measurement, urban quality of life initiatives, and urban planning in part draws on the ideas of classical pragmatism in the development of the conceptual framework and focus of analysis.

The health sector's administrators' use of pragmatism has been criticized as incomplete in its pragmatism, however, according to the classical pragmatists, knowledge is always shaped by human interests. The administrator's focus on "outcomes" simply advances their own interest, and this focus on outcomes often undermines their citizen's interests, which often are more concerned with process. On the other hand, David Brendel argues that pragmatism's ability to bridge dualisms, focus on practical problems, include multiple perspectives, incorporate participation from interested parties (patient, family, health team), and provisional nature makes it well suited to address problems in this area.

Effects on feminism
Since the mid 1990s, feminist philosophers have re-discovered classical pragmatism as a source of feminist theories. Works by Seigfried, Duran, Keith, and Whipps explore the historic and philosophic links between feminism and pragmatism. The connection between pragmatism and feminism took so long to be rediscovered because pragmatism itself was eclipsed by logical positivism during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As a result, it was lost from feminist discourse. Feminists now consider pragmatism's greatest strength to be the very features that led to its decline. These are "persistent and early criticisms of positivist interpretations of scientific methodology; disclosure of value dimension of factual claims"; viewing aesthetics as informing everyday experience; subordinating logical analysis to political, cultural, and social issues; linking the dominant discourses with domination; "realigning theory with praxis; and resisting the turn to epistemology and instead emphasizing concrete experience".

Feminist philosophers point to Jane Addams as a founder of classical pragmatism. Mary Parker Follett was also an important feminist pragmatist concerned with organizational operation during the early decades of the 20th century. In addition, the ideas of Dewey, Mead, and James are consistent with many feminist tenets. Jane Addams, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead developed their philosophies as all three became friends, influenced each other, and were engaged in the Hull House experience and women's rights causes.

Criticisms
In the 1908 essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms", Arthur Oncken Lovejoy argued that there's significant ambiguity in the notion of the effects of the truth of a proposition and those of belief in a proposition in order to highlight that many pragmatists had failed to recognize that distinction. He identified 13 different philosophical positions that were each labeled pragmatism.

The Franciscan friar Celestine Bittle presented multiple criticisms of pragmatism in his 1936 book Reality and the Mind: Epistemology. He argued that, in William James's pragmatism, truth is entirely subjective and is not the widely accepted definition of truth, which is correspondence to reality. For Bittle, defining truth as what is useful is a "perversion of language". With truth reduced essentially to what is good, it is no longer an object of the intellect. Therefore, the problem of knowledge posed by the intellect is not solved, but rather renamed. Renaming truth as a product of the will cannot help it solve the problems of the intellect, according to Bittle. Bittle cited what he saw as contradictions in pragmatism, such as using objective facts to prove that truth does not emerge from objective fact; this reveals that pragmatists do recognize truth as objective fact, and not, as they claim, what is useful. Bittle argued there are also some statements that cannot be judged on human welfare at all. Such statements (for example the assertion that "a car is passing") are matters of "truth and error" and do not affect human welfare.

British philosopher Bertrand Russell devoted a chapter each to James and Dewey in his 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy; Russell pointed out areas in which he agreed with them but also ridiculed James's views on truth and Dewey's views on inquiry. Hilary Putnam later argued that Russell "presented a mere caricature" of James's views and a "misreading of James",  while Tom Burke argued at length that Russell presented "a skewed characterization of Dewey's point of view". Elsewhere, in Russell's book The Analysis of Mind, Russell praised James's radical empiricism, to which Russell's own account of neutral monism was indebted. Dewey, in The Bertrand Russell Case, defended Russell against an attempt to remove Russell from his chair at the College of the City of New York in 1940.

Neopragmatism as represented by Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by other neopragmatists such as Susan Haack and by many analytic philosophers. Rorty's early analytic work, however, differs notably from his later work which some, including Rorty, consider to be closer to literary criticism than to philosophy, and which attracts the brunt of criticism from his detractors.

Classical (1850–1950)
Protopragmatists or related thinkers

Other

title: Pragmatism


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Panasonic

Panasonic Holdings Corporation (パナソニック ホールディングス株式会社) is a Japanese multinational electronics company, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Japan. It was founded in 1918 as Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works (松下電気器具製作所) in Fukushima, Osaka by Kōnosuke Matsushita. In 1935, it was incorporated and renamed Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (松下電器産業株式会社) In 2008, it changed its name to Panasonic Corporation. (パナソニック株式会社) In 2022, it became a holding company and was renamed.

In addition to consumer electronics, of which it was the world's largest maker in the late 20th century, Panasonic offers a wide range of products and services, including rechargeable batteries, automotive and avionic systems, industrial systems, as well as home renovation and construction. Panasonic has a primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX 100 indices. It has a secondary listing on the Nagoya Stock Exchange.

Corporate name
From 1925 to October 1, 2008, the company's corporate name was "Matsushita Electric Industrial Co." (MEI). On January 10, 2008, the company announced that it would change its name to "Panasonic Corporation", in effect on October 1, 2008, to conform with its global brand name "Panasonic". The name change was approved at the shareholders' meeting on June 26, 2008.

In 2022, Panasonic announced a reorganization plan which split the company into Panasonic Holdings Corporation (the former Panasonic Corporation) and conversion of its divisions into subsidiaries; the Lifestyle Updates Business Division being the division that took the Panasonic Corporation name after the reorganization. The reorganization took effect on April 1, 2022.

Brand names
Panasonic Corporation currently sells virtually all of its products and services worldwide under the Panasonic brand, having phased out the Sanyo brand in the first quarter of 2012. It uses the marketing slogan "A Better Life, A Better World". The company has sold products under a number of other brand names during its history.

In 1927, Matsushita adopted the "National" (ナショナル) brand name for a new lamp product. In 1955, the company began branding audio speakers and lamps as "PanaSonic" for markets outside of Japan. Further refined to Panasonic, taken from the words "pan" – meaning "all" – and "sonic" – meaning "sound", the brand was created for the Americas because the National brand was already registered by others. Panasonic also sold the first bread machine.

The company began to use the brand name "Technics" (テクニクス) in 1965 for audio equipment. The use of multiple brands lasted for some decades. While National had been the premier brand on most Matsushita products, including audio and video, National and Panasonic were combined as National Panasonic in 1997 after the worldwide success of the Panasonic name.

In 1974, Motorola sold its Quasar brand and facilities to Matsushita.

In May 2003, the company announced that Panasonic would become its global brand, and launched the global tagline "Panasonic ideas for life." By March 2004, Matsushita replaced the National name for products and outdoor signboards, except for those in Japan. They would eventually phase out the National brand in Japan by March 2010.

In September 2013, the company adopted a new tagline to better illustrate their vision: "A Better Life, A Better World."

The Chinese company Shun Hing Electric Works and Engineering Co. Ltd (信興電工工程有限公司) has sold imported Panasonic and National branded product under the brand name Rasonic since the Matsushita Electric Industrial era. They have also sold MEI and Panasonic products under their original brand names. In June 1994, Panasonic Shun Hing Industrial Devices Sales (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. (松下信興機電(香港)有限公司) and Panasonic SH Industrial Sales (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (松下電器機電(深圳)有限公司) were established by joint venture between Matsushita Electric Industrial and Shun Hing Group respectively, making Rasonic a product brand for MEI and subsequently the Panasonic Corporation.

In September 2014, Panasonic announced the revival of the Technics brand, first in European markets in December of that year.

20th century
Panasonic, then Matsushita Electric, was founded in 1918 by Kōnosuke Matsushita as a vendor of duplex lamp sockets. In the 1920s, Matsushita began regularly launching products. In 1927, he produced a line of bicycle lamps that were the first to be marketed with the National brand name. During World War II, the company operated factories in Japan and other parts of Asia which produced electrical components and appliances such as light fixtures, motors, electric irons, wireless equipment and its first vacuum tubes.

After the war, the Matsushita group, largely having been split into MEI and MEW by the dissolution imposed by the occupation force, imperfectly regrouped as a Keiretsu and began to supply the post-war boom in Japan with radios and appliances, as well as bicycles. Matsushita's brother-in-law, Toshio Iue, founded Sanyo as a subcontractor for components after World War II. Sanyo grew to become a competitor to Matsushita, but was later acquired by Panasonic in December 2009.

In 1961, Matsushita traveled to the United States and met American dealers. The company began producing television sets for the U.S. market under the Panasonic brand name, and expanded the use of the brand to Europe in 1979.

Its plant in 1963 produced eight TV sets per minute, accounting for 21.8% of Japan's production of cathode ray tube television sets at the time, the largest share out of any company.

The company used the National brand outside North America from the 1950s to the 1970s (the trademark could not be used in the United States because it was already in use). The inability to use the National brand name led to the creation of the Panasonic brand in the United States. Over the next several decades, Matsushita released additional products, including black and white TVs (1952), electrical blenders, fridges (1953), rice cookers (1959), color TVs, and microwave ovens (1966).

The company debuted a high-fidelity audio speaker in Japan in 1965 with the brand Technics. This line of high quality stereo components became a worldwide favorite, the most famous products being its turntables, such as the SL-1200 record player, known for its high-performance, precision and durability. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Matsushita continued to produce high-quality specialized electronics for niche markets, such as shortwave radios, and developed its successful line of stereo receivers, CD players and other components.

In 1968, Matsushita began to make rotary compressors for air conditioners, and, in 1971, it began to make absorption chillers, also for air-conditioning applications.

In 1972, Matsushita established its first overseas factory, in Malaysia.

In 1973, Matsushita established "Anam National", joint venture with Anam Group in South Korea.

In 1983, Matsushita launched the Panasonic Senior Partner, the first fully IBM PC compatible Japanese-made computer. A year later, Panasonic released the Executive Partner, the first affordable portable computer with a plasma display. Around this time the company also introduced inverter air conditioners.

In 1984, Matsushita established the Panasoft software label, which published software for MSX computers from 1984 to 1989. The company also manufactured MSX computers of their own, such as Panasonic FS-A1.

In November 1990, Matsushita agreed to acquire an American media company, MCA Inc., the predecessor of both Universal Music Group and Universal Pictures, for US$6.59 billion. The acquisition was preceded by the takeover of Columbia Pictures by Sony, the arch rival of Matsushita. At the time, Matsushita had dominated the home video market with the company's leading position in the electronics market. It had been strengthened by VHS, the de facto standard of consumer videotape that Matsushita and JVC co-introduced. Inspired by Sony's bold quest for Hollywood, Matsushita believed it could become a leader in the film industry as well. However, Matsushita subsequently sold 80% of MCA to Seagram Company for US$7 billion in April 1995, demoralized by the high volatility of the film industry.

In 1992, Matsushita made the Panasonic FS-A1GT, the last model of the MSX turbo R computer.

In 1993, Matsushita released the CF-V21P, the notebook computer to have an integrated CD-ROM drive as an option (although only up to 80mm/3.5 inch diameter mini CDs instead of standard 120mm/4.7 inch diameter discs).

In 1998, Matsushita sold Anam National to Anam Electronics.

2000 to present
On May 2, 2002, Panasonic Canada marked its 35th anniversary in that country by giving $5 million to help build a "music city" on Toronto's waterfront.

In 2005, Matsushita Toshiba Picture Display Co. Ltd. (a joint venture between Matsushita and Toshiba created in 2002 ) stopped production of CRTs at its factory in Horseheads, New York. A year later, in 2006, it stopped production at its Malaysian factory, following heavy losses. In 2007, it bought the venture from Toshiba, eventually ending all production.

On January 19, 2006, Matsushita announced that it would stop producing analog televisions (then 30% of its total TV business) from the next month, to concentrate on digital televisions.

In 2008, all models of electric shavers from the Panasonic factory were called Panasonic shavers, and they dropped Matsushita and National from their name.

In late 2006, Matsushita began talks with Kenwood Corporation to sell and spin off JVC. As of October 1, 2008, JVC and Kenwood merged to create the JVCKenwood Corporation.

On November 3, 2008, Panasonic and Sanyo announced that they were holding merger talks, which eventually resulted in the acquisition of Sanyo by Panasonic. The merger was completed in December 2009, and resulted in a corporation with revenues of over ¥11.2 trillion (around $110 billion).

With the announcement that Pioneer would exit the production of its Kuro plasma HDTV displays, Panasonic purchased many of the patents and incorporated these technologies into its own plasma displays.

In April 2011, it was announced that Panasonic would cut its work force by 40,000 by the end of fiscal 2012 in a bid to streamline overlapping operations. The curtailment is about 10 percent of its group work force.

In October 2011, Panasonic announced that it was going to trim its money-losing TV business by ceasing production of plasma TVs at its plant in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture by March 2012, cutting 1,000 jobs in the process. Also, it sold some of Sanyo's home appliances business to Haier.

In January 2012, Panasonic announced that it had struck a deal with Myspace on its new venture, Myspace TV. Myspace TV would allow users to watch live television while chatting with other users on a laptop, tablet or the television itself. With the partnership, Myspace TV would be integrated into Panasonic Viera televisions.

On May 11, 2012, Panasonic announced plans to acquire a 76.2% stake in FirePro Systems, an India-based company in infrastructure protection and security solutions such as fire alarm, fire suppression, video surveillance and building management.

In April 2012, Panasonic spun off Sanyo DI Solutions, a digital camera OEM.

In line with company prediction of a net loss of 765 billion yen, on November 5, 2012, the shares fell to the lowest level since February 1975 to 388 yen. In 2012, the shares plunged 41 per cent. On November 14, 2012, Panasonic said it would cut 10,000 jobs and make further divestments.

On May 18, 2013, Panasonic announced that it would invest $US40 million in building a factory in Binh Duong, Vietnam, which was completed in 2014.

In July 2013, Panasonic agreed to acquire a 13% stake in the Slovenian household appliance manufacturer Gorenje for around €10 million. That same month, Panasonic signed an agreement with Sony Corporation to develop Archival Disc, described as an optical disc format for long-term data archival purposes.

In a press release following its announcement at IFA 2013, Panasonic announced that it had acquired the "Cameramanager video surveillance service" with the intention of expanding its reach to cloud-based solutions.

In 2014, Panasonic Healthcare was bought by KKR. Panasonic Healthcare was renamed PHC in April 2018.

In July 2014, it was announced that Panasonic has reached a basic agreement with Tesla Motors to participate in the Gigafactory, the battery plant that the American electric vehicle manufacturer plans to build in the U.S. In August 2014, Tesla said the plant would be built in the Southwest or Western United States by 2020. The $US5 billion plant would employ 6,500 people, and reduce Tesla's battery costs by 30 per cent. The company said it was looking at potential sites in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California.

In October 2014, Panasonic announced its initial investment in Tesla Motors' battery factory would amount to "tens of billions" of yen, according to the firm's CEO.

In November 2014, Panasonic announced its partnership with Photon Interactive to create customized and personalized digital signs in stores.

In January 2015, Panasonic announced it has stopped making TVs in China and plans to liquidate its joint venture in Shandong.

In March 2015, Panasonic announced plans to buy US satellite communication service provider ITC Global.

In April 2015, Panasonic announced its new range of products and relaunched its brand in South Africa. The company intends to use South Africa as a springboard into Africa, with Nigeria and Egypt as its initial targets.

In June 2015, Panasonic reached agreements with three Australian energy utilities (Red Energy, Ergon Energy and ActewAGL) to trial its home-based battery storage options.

In November 2015, Panasonic announced that it set up a new plant in Suzhou, China, through its subsidiary, Panasonic Ecology Systems Co., Ltd, to produce a new type of catalyst-coated diesel particulate filter (DPF) that decomposes matter contained in diesel engine exhaust gas.

In November 2015, Panasonic starts to retail locally harvested produce from its indoor agriculture facility salads via Veggie Life branding in Singapore, from the first licensed indoor vegetable farm in the country using Panasonic's own technology.

In February 2016, Panasonic and the City of Denver formed a formal partnership to make Denver the "smartest" city in the US. Joseph M. Taylor, chairman and CEO of Panasonic Corp. of America, laid out the plans for the partnership in four key areas: smart housing and small offices, energy and utilities, transportation and city services and smart buildings.

Due to increased competition from China, Panasonic's Li-ion automotive market share decreased from 47% in 2014 to 34% in 2015. In June 2016, Tesla announced that Panasonic would be the exclusive supplier of batteries for its mass market vehicle Model 3. Batteries for the higher-end Model S sedan and Model X SUV will also be supplied by Panasonic. In early 2016, Panasonic president Kazuhiro Tsuga confirmed a planned total investment of about $1.6 billion by the company to construct Gigafactory to full capacity. However, after the number of Model 3 reservations became known in April, Panasonic moved production plans forward and announced a bond sale for $US3.86 billion, most of it to be invested in Gigafactory.

In 2016, Panasonic debuted a transparent TV.

In January 2016, Panasonic bought Bayer's diabetes care business for $1 billion.

In July 2016, Panasonic unveiled its interest in making acquisitions in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning space. According to a source, the company has put aside $US10 million for use in either an acquisition or joint venture.

In August 2018, the company announced, to avoid potential tax issues, Panasonic would move its European headquarters from the UK to Amsterdam in October as Brexit approaches.

On September 25, 2018, Panasonic became one of the founding members of the L-Mount Alliance, and announced two full-frame mirrorless cameras and a range of L-Mount lenses to be launched in 2019. The 47-megapixel Panasonic Lumix S1R and the 24-megapixel Panasonic Lumix S1 will be the first full-frame mirrorless cameras produced by Panasonic and will offer the Lumix Pro support service for professional photographers. These cameras will also be equipped with Dual Image Stabilization technology to help photographers when shooting in low-light.

In 2019, Panasonic sold its semiconductors and security systems (security camera) businesses. The company also decided to completely exit from the liquid-crystal display panel business by 2021, marking the end of its display production, to focus its resources on the automotive and industrial businesses. Panasonic's LCD plant in Himeji, Hyogo will be overhauled to manufacture automotive batteries.

In 2020, Panasonic exited the vending machine business, as it failed to achieve profitability, lagging behind rivals Fuji Electric, Sanden and Glory.

Meanwhile, Panasonic has made an investment to take a 20% stake in Blue Yonder, the supply-chain management software company previously known as JDA Software, deepening the integration of the former's industrial connected technology and the latter's products that has been under way since a year ago.

On November 19, 2020, Panasonic announced a restructuring set to be completed by 2022 in which the company spins off the domain companies as wholly owned subsidiaries while transforming itself into the holding company named Panasonic Holdings Corporation. Panasonic's plans are similar to that of its competitor, Sony, did on April 1, 2021, when Sony Corporation became Sony Group Corporation.

In November 2020, Panasonic signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Equinor and Norsk Hydro to set up a Gigafactory in Norway, for battery production.

In January 2021, the company announced that it would end its solar panel production.

In March 2021, it was reported that Panasonic will buy Blue Yonder for $US6.45 billion after buying a 20% stake in Blue Yonder for 86 billion yen in 2020. This deal is considered one of the biggest since 2011.

In June 2021, it was reported that Panasonic sold its entire stake in Tesla for $US3.6 billion.

In August 2022, it was reported that the company, which is a supplier to Tesla, was in discussions to build a new electric vehicle battery plant in the US, with Oklahoma named as a leading contender. This would be on top of the plant planned for Kansas. Each would have similar capacity. In the first half of 2022, Panasonic is ranked fourth in the world with a market share of 10 per cent according to SNE research. Construction of the battery plant in Kansas began in November 2022.

Current operations
As of March 31, 2012, Panasonic employed about 330,000 staff (reduced to around 260,000 by March 2020) and had around 580 subsidiaries. Panasonic had total revenues of ¥7,846,216 million in 2012, of which 53 percent were generated in Japan, 25 per cent in Asia (excluding Japan), 12 per cent in the Americas and 10 per cent in Europe. The company invested a total of ¥520,216 million in research and development in 2012, equivalent to 6.6 percent of its revenues in that year.

In 2012, Panasonic held a total of 140,146 patents worldwide. Panasonic was the world's top patent applicant for three decades, from the 1980s to the 2000s. According to a research conducted by the European Patent Office in 2020, the number of battery-related patents having been filed by Panasonic from 2000 to 2018 was the second-highest in the world. In 2021, the WIPO's annual review of the World Intellectual Property Indicators report ranked Panasonic's number of patent applications published under the PCT System as 10th in the world, with 1,611 patent applications being published during 2020. This position is up from their previous ranking as 12th in 2019 with 1,567 applications.

As of July 2020, Panasonic's operations are organised into seven "domain companies": Appliances, Life Solutions, Connected Solutions, Automotive, Industrial Solutions, and two overseas branches overseeing the businesses in the United States and Asia. Each of these companies may comprise multiple subsidiaries conducting actual operations.

Panasonic Homes
Panasonic Homes (formerly PanaHome) was a Japanese real estate and construction company and a subsidiary of Life Solutions Company, Panasonic, founded as the housing unit of Matsushita Electric Works in 1963. In recent years, Panasonic Homes has been involved in developing smart cities. In 2019, it was announced that Toyota and Panasonic would initiate a process to merge their housing businesses, Toyota Housing and Misawa Homes from the former and Panasonic Homes of the latter, into a joint venture scheduled to be established in January 2020 and co-controlled by the two parties, named Prime Life Technologies Corporation.

Panasonic Avionics Corporation
Panasonic Avionics Corporation (PAC), a subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation of North America and a unit of Connected Solutions Company, Panasonic, is a supplier of in-flight entertainment (IFE) and communication systems. Headquartered in Irvine, California where engineering, development and testing is performed while system installation, field engineering, major quality functions, certification and program management are performed at the Bothell, Washington facility – Panasonic Avionics Corporation employs approximately 3,300 employees based in over 70 locations worldwide, with major facilities in London, Toulouse, Hamburg, Dallas, Dubai, and Singapore. A majority of the component manufacturing is carried out in Osaka, Japan.

In February 2017, Panasonic reported that the subsidiary was being investigated by American authorities under the FCPA.

Panasonic Mobile Communications
Panasonic Mobile Communications manufactures mobile phone handsets and related equipment. As of 2012, it had around a 20 percent share of the Japanese handset market. Panasonic used to market mobile phone handsets worldwide, but in December 2005 announced its withdrawal from overseas markets due to poor sales. Panasonic returned to the overseas market in 2012, with the release of the Panasonic Eluga Android-powered smartphone. In July 2013, Panasonic announced the company will not supply a new model of smartphone to NTT DoCoMo Inc., because NTT DoCoMo will focus with Sony and Samsung products. In Q2 2013, Panasonic Mobile Communications booked a 5.4 billion yen operating loss. From July 2013 to January 2018, Panasonic India has released one more series of Android Smartphones Panasonic P Series, along with Eluga Series.

Automotive Systems division
Automotive Systems Business Division, Automotive Company, Panasonic, formerly Panasonic Automotive Systems (PAS), is a subcontractor to most major auto manufacturers, supplying virtually every Japanese and American automaker along with many European automakers. In 2015, PAS had a revenue of $12.4 billion. Panasonic also purchased the assets of Sanyo Corporation in 2017. Panasonic also formerly manufactured aftermarket vehicle audio products such as head units and speakers.

Giga Nevada
Panasonic is the financial/technological partner of Tesla-owned Giga Nevada (Gigafactory 1) and has invested in the factory ever since the project's conception; in contrast to Tesla ever expanding its battery production to overseas, Panasonic has refrained from taking part in Tesla's ventures elsewhere; aside from Giga Nevada, it has own sites in Japan from which it has served Tesla since before the completion of the Gigafactory.

Prime Planet Energy and Solutions
In 2020, Panasonic founded an electric vehicle battery joint venture with Toyota, named Prime Planet Energy & Solutions Inc. (PPES), after its status as the exclusive battery supplier to Tesla has been diminished amid the changes in market environment, such as the rises of the competitors from South Korea and China and Tesla's move to bring the development and manufacturing of battery cells in-house. Panasonic owns 49% of the venture. It was the first time the two companies joined hands in the realm of battery technology since Primearth EV Energy (PEVE) kicked off in 1996 to produce batteries for hybrid electric cars.

Panasonic Corporation of North America
Panasonic Corporation of North America is Panasonic's principal subsidiary in the United States. It has been headquartered in Newark, New Jersey since 2013, after being previously headquartered in Secaucus, since the 1980s; both Newark and Secaucus are located within New Jersey's Gateway Region.

Founded in New York City at the MetLife Building in September 1959, it was known as Matsushita Electric Corporation of America (MECA) prior to 2005.

Panasonic Eco Systems North America, a business unit of Panasonic North America, distributes renewable energy products in the United States and Canada. Established in 2012, Panasonic Eco Systems sells renewable energy systems and home energy management products, including high efficiency solar panels, battery storage systems, and indoor air quality products. It also distributes cordless assembly tools used on factory assembly lines. In 2016, the company began expanding its network of residential solar installers to market Panasonic Solar HIT (heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer ) panels and battery storage nationally, reaching 150 authorized installers by November 2018. The company began offering a 25-year warranty for its HIT photovoltaic modules – compared to the industry standard at the time of 10 years – in 2017. In 2019, Panasonic introduced its EverVolt brand of solar and battery storage products. The company transitioned its solar panel manufacturing to OEMs in early 2021 to focus on offering a wider range of products. Later that year, Panasonic debuted the EverVolt 2.0 energy storage system rated for outdoor use.

Panasonic Europe
Panasonic's principal subsidiaries in Europe are Panasonic Europe Ltd. and Panasonic Marketing Europe GmbH. Panasonic Europe is headquartered in London, England, but it is moving its headquarters to Amsterdam, Netherlands due to Brexit. Panasonic employs around 12,000 people in Europe, and the region generates around 10 percent of its total revenues. In 2012, Panasonic had around a 10 percent share of the consumer electronics market in Europe, ranking third behind Samsung Electronics (with 26 percent) and LG Electronics (with 12 percent).

Panasonic operates a chain of stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland called "Panasonic Store" which exclusively sell Panasonic products. Prior to 2008 the chain was named "shop@Panasonic".

In November 2010, Panasonic Electric Works established Panasonic Electric Works Vossloh-Schwabe Serbia d.o.o, a new company in Svilajnac, Serbia, to manufacture energy-efficient electronic devices (ballasts) for lighting fixtures. Volume production commenced in January 2011.

In May 2015, Panasonic launched its virtual solar service to UK consumers. The service allows users to run a simulation to provide an estimate of how much a rooftop solar installation would produce if it were installed in their home.

Panasonic India
Mr. Daizo Ito serves as Group President for Panasonic Regional Headquarters India (situated in Haryana) at Panasonic India Pvt. Ltd. Panasonic India makes washing machines, refrigerators, electric rice cookers, electric irons, mixer-grinders/blenders and other home appliances for the Indian market.

Panasonic Life Solutions India Pvt Ltd (formerly known as Anchor Electricals Pvt. Ltd.), an Indian company which makes electric lamps, switches, sockets and other electrical accessories, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation.

PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia
PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia (formerly known as PT National Gobel and PT National Panasonic Gobel) is the name of the company's Indonesia division based in Cawang, East Jakarta. Tomonobu Otsu is the current President Director and Rachmat Gobel is the current President Commissioner. It is a joint venture between Panasonic Corporation Japan and the Gobel Group of Indonesia.

MCA Inc.
Matsushita bought American media company MCA Inc. for US$6.6 billion. In 1995, it sold 80% of MCA's shares to Canadian drink company Seagram. MCA was renamed Universal Studios Inc. in 1996, after which its motion picture business has changed hands continuously, Vivendi, General Electric and Comcast in order, while the music division has become Universal Music Group, acquired and wholly owned by Vivendi up until 2019.

Panasonic 3DO
Panasonic manufactured their 3DO gaming systems from 1993 to 1996 alongside GoldStar and Sanyo, however it was not a success. There were a total of 2 million systems sold during its lifespan, although it is not known how many of these were sold by each manufacturer. Panasonic obtained exclusive rights to manufacture the 3DO's successor console, the M2, but ultimately backed out of releasing it due to the highly competitive state of the console gaming market at that time.

Panasonic Healthcare
In 2014, Panasonic Healthcare was bought by outside investors and renamed as PHCHD, which stands for Panasonic HealthCare HD. It mainly makes cryogenic and ULT freezers for laboratories and sterilization equipment.

Panasonic Semiconductor Solutions
Panasonic had been in the semiconductor industry since 1957, when it started the mass production of silicon transistors and bipolar ICs. From 2012 onwards the company had implemented a series of measures to boost productivity of the business, including transfers of its production facilities to a joint venture with TowerJazz, and the system-on-a-chip designing unit to Panasonic/Fujitsu joint venture Socionext.

In 2019, Panasonic decided to sell its remaining chip business and the stake in the joint venture with TowerJazz to Nuvoton following heavy losses.

Products
Panasonic has offered a wide range of products and services, including air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, compressors, lighting, televisions, personal computers(Matsushita JR series, Let's Note), mobile phones (as a subsidiary of TCL Electronics), audio equipment, cameras, broadcasting equipment, projectors, automotive electronics, aircraft in-flight entertainment systems, semiconductors, lithium batteries, electrical components, optical devices, bicycles, electronic materials, video game systems (3DO), and photovoltaic modules. Ventilation appliances such as electric fans are manufactured under KDK and rebranded as Panasonic.

Football
Panasonic sponsors the German footballer Marco Reus, who plays for Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund and Germany.

Panasonic owns Panasonic Wild Knights a rugby club base in Gunma just outside of Tokyo. They compete in the highest level of rugby in Japan Top League.

Panasonic owns Gamba Osaka, a club from the J.League, the Japanese professional football league.

Panasonic is an official partner and sponsor of AFC Champions League and Major League Soccer.

Between 1981 and 1983, Panasonic was the shirt sponsor of English football club Nottingham Forest F.C.

On January 16, 2010, Panasonic signed a three-year, ₹ 47 million (£518,500) jersey sponsorship deal for the India national football team.

Other
Panasonic was a primary sponsor of Toyota's Formula One program, Panasonic Toyota Racing. Hiro Matsushita, grandson of the company founder, is a former race car driver who ran a company overseeing sponsorship arrangements for the company.

Panasonic was also a sponsor in NASCAR's Busch Series in 2005, sponsoring the No. 67 Smith Brothers Racing Dodge for Ken Schrader, Bryan Reffner, C.W. Smith, and Johnny Benson Jr. In 2007, Panasonic became a technology partner with Hendrick Motorsports and served as a primary sponsor of the team's No. 24 car with Jeff Gordon for two races in 2014 and throughout 2015. .

Panasonic has been a top level sponsor of the Olympic Games since the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

Panasonic was the official partner and sponsor of the Boston Celtics from 1975 to 1989, along with Technics. Various Panasonic ads appeared at the old Boston Garden during the 1980s.

Panasonic is the current sponsor for the ride Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek at Tokyo Disneyland Park. It opened in 2009.

On September 8, 2016, Panasonic was unveiled as the title sponsor for the new Jaguar Formula E team.

On February 14, 2017, Panasonic was unveiled as the main sponsor of Lega Basket Serie A, the highest professional basketball league in Italy and one of the top ranked national domestic league in Europe.

Panasonic currently sponsors Japanese IndyCar Series driver Takuma Sato in his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing car.

Environmental record
Panasonic is ranked in joint 11th place (out of 16) in Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, which ranks electronics manufacturers on policies and practices to reduce their impact on the climate, produce greener products and make their operations more sustainable. The company is one of the top scorers on the Products criteria, praised for its good product life cycles and the number of products which are free from polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC). It also scores maximum points for the energy efficiency of its products with 100 percent of its TVs meeting the latest Energy Star standards and exceeding the standby power requirement.

However, Panasonic's score is let down by its low score on the Energy criteria, with the Guide stating it must focus on planned reductions of greenhouse gases (GHG), set targets to reduce GHG emissions by at least 30% by 2015 and increase renewable energy use by 2020.

In 2014, an article in The Guardian reported that Panasonic will compensate its expatriate workers in China a "hazard pay" as compensation for the chronic air pollution they are subjected to as they work.

In 2020, Panasonic joined WIPO GREEN as an official partner in an effort to address climate change.

In February 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Panasonic got its highest-emitting Chinese factory to "virtually net zero" carbon dioxide.

Senior leadership

 * Chairman: Kazuhiro Tsuga (since April 2021)
 * President and CEO: Yuki Kusumi (since April 2021)

List of former chairmen

 * 1) Kōnosuke Matsushita (1961–1973)
 * 2) Arataro Takahashi (1973–1977)
 * 3) Masaharu Matsushita (1973–2000)
 * 4) Yoichi Morishita (2000–2006)
 * 5) Kunio Nakamura (2006–2012)
 * 6) Fumio Ōtsubo (2012–2021)

List of former presidents and CEOs

 * 1) Kōnosuke Matsushita (1918–1961)
 * 2) Masaharu Matsushita (1961–1977)
 * 3) Toshihiko Yamashita (1977–1986)
 * 4) Akio Tanii (1986–1993)
 * 5) Yoichi Morishita (1993–2000)
 * 6) Kunio Nakamura (2000–2006)
 * 7) Fumio Ōtsubo (2006–2012)
 * 8) Kazuhiro Tsuga (2012–2021)

Slogan history

 * "Just slightly ahead of our time" (1970s–1990s)
 * "Even more than you expected [out of the blue]" (1970s–1996, Australia)
 * "What's on Panasonic" (1990–1996)
 * "The quest for zero defect" (1990s–2003, South Africa)
 * "Panasonic, The One That I Want" (1996–2003, USA)
 * "What's New by Panasonic" (1996–2003)
 * "Ideas For Life" (2003–2013, Global)
 * "A Better Life, A Better World" (2013–2023)
 * "Wonders!" (2014–2017, Japan)
 * "Let's Live Life Better" (2017–2018, Indonesia)
 * "Live Your Best" (2022–present, Global)
 * "Create Today. Enrich Tomorrow." (2022–present)
 * "Make New" (2023–present, Japan)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Panasonic


text:
AKM (disambiguation)

An AKM is an assault rifle designed by Soviet small arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1959.

AKM may also refer to:

Businesses and organisations

 * AKM Semiconductor, Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in San Jose, California
 * Alpha Kappa Mu, an American collegiate honor society
 * Atatürk Cultural Center, a cultural center in Istanbul
 * , the Austrian copyright collection agency
 * Vanguard of Red Youth, a radical Russian socialist youth group

Other uses

 * Abul Kalam Mohammad, a common compound male given name in Bangladesh.
 * Apogee kick motor, a rocket motor that is regularly employed on artificial satellites

title: AKM (disambiguation)


text:
Talk:List of children's literature writers

(very old talk)
I'd think "children's literature" covers pretty much everything from picture books to young adult fiction. --Damian Yerrick

Should the fact a book won an award be mentioned on this page or would it be better suited to be just mentioned on the specific book page? Sukee
 * Gut feeling: let this be just a list; awards on the specific page. Quill 22:16, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)+

Flowers in the Attic is not a children's book
I'm pretty sure that Flowers in the Attic is NOT considered a children's book. If there are no objections, I'm going to remove V.C. Andrews from this list. Joyous (talk) 22:35, September 11, 2005 (UTC) Chaucer really considered a children's author? Joyous! | Talk 16:59, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
I am the proprietor of Cnposner Books; a company which has recently acquired the rights for the reprint of The Green Bronze Mirror by Lynne Ellison. I have created two new articles concerning this author, and have edited the article on Children's literature (List of children's authors) to include her. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cnposner (talk • contribs) 17:10, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria?
Are there any identified inclusion criteria for this list? When should an author appear, and when not appear? Jheald (talk) 15:55, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
 * is correct about Children's literature that Children's routinely covers everything from children's picture books up to young adult fiction that some U.S. library records recommend for "Senior (high school) students" (ages usually 15-18).
 * That may not be very useful to anyone. And there are other dimensions.
 * writers implies a contribution other than illustration. How much text qualifies a picture book?
 * literature is sometimes taken to mean narrative, even fiction.
 * supposing clear scope of "children's literature writers", which ones are "notable" and which are their "most famous" works?

 * I hope we all agree that the list is not "Top importance"! Cautiously I downgrade it to "High". --P64 (talk) 20:37, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * This hour I rewrote the lead sentence, preserving all keywords. I replaced the second, instructional sentence with a comment (which is invisible), "See that article for some help identifying works of children's literature". The preface should include a brief account of "criteria used to define something as a work of children's literature", in the words of the previous instruction to "See children's literature ...".
 * And I moved template Inc-lit to the top per its documentation.
 * Those changes were incidental to my adding 2 authors, 2 external links, perhaps 10 titles and 20 dates, and [see next section]. --P64 (talk) 00:35, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Series
The word "series" is rarely part of a title, and then it should be "Series" (same for "trilogy" and others).

The word "The" at the head of a series listing is only occasionally part of a title.

For almost all entries A–E and N–O but almost no others, I moved "series" outside of italics and deleted "The" where it is not part of our article name. Generally I made this change without checking that our article name (Spy High in the example) should be in italics.
 * Example: The Spy High series ==> Spy High series

--P64 (talk) 00:35, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

 * Now I have covered the entire list A–Z in the limited sense described above; that is, relying almost entirely on our coverage in book and series articles, especially our article titles/pagenames. For another example, one listing displays "Clarice Bean series" because that is the title of our series article: including the word 'series', lowercase; without any italics. Commonly I didn't even check the target page, for the simplest cases such as the preceding example "Spy High series" (whose target page does support the simply typography fix, I see now).
 * --P64 (talk) 18:33, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Redlinks, bluelinks
This list now displays several redlink writers, with all writer names linked if i clerk correctly (as well as numerous redlink book titles among many bluelinks and many unlinked).

Two listings include WP:Interlanguage bluelinks (3), which are "false positives" concerning EN.wiki coverage--in that the difference between the dark blue (EN) and light blue (inter-language) wikilinks is subtle.
 * writer Leif Hamre
 * Peter Härtling books Ben liebt Anna and Krücke

--P64 (talk) 18:45, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Concerning writer names (no book titles) with copy-paste Exhibits from the current version.

1. Who should be listed? Who among them should be redlinked? Exhibits:
 * Dale E. Basye – Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
 * Stacy Gregg – Pony Club Secrets series
 * Caryl Cude Mullin – A Riddle of Roses
 * Dashka Slater – Baby Shoes, The Sea Serpent and Me, Dangerously Ever After
 * Julia Suzuki – Yoshiko and the Gift of Charms
 * Michael Walsh (1947) – Martha Counts Her Kittens, Martha Paints with Her Kittens
 * Regina Webb (born 1980) - Detective Henry Hopper series

2. Who should have multiple listings with cross-references? If only one listing, where should it be alphabetized? Exhibits:
 * Julie Andrews [no listing]
 * Julie Edwards (Dame Julie Andrews, born 1935) – The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles

 * "BB" (D. J. Watkins-Pitchford) (1905–1990) – The Little Grey Men, Down the Bright Stream, Bill Badger and the Pirates
 * D. J. Watkins-Pitchford [no listing]

 * Lynde Palmer (see Mary Louise Peebles)
 * Mary Louise Peebles, a.k.a. Lynde Palmer (1833–1915) – The Magnet Stories

--P64 (talk) 17:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Vital dates
Listings generally include one or two vital dates, either "(born YYYY)" or "(YYYY–YYYY)".

For any listing with bluelink writer and no vital date: visit our page for the writer and do one of the following:
 * 1) add to the listing the birth year or lifespan that we give in the lead sentence of a biography --put it in the lead sentence if we adequately give the data elsewhere (none today)
 * 2) add to the listing in place of the vital dates a hidden WP:COMMENT noting that the bluelink target is not biography (today, 2 redirects)
 * 3) ensure that the biography is in  (example ) or  if deceased (none today) --and same for Place of birth missing, if applicable

S to Z ✅ today. --P64 (talk) 22:08, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

A to O, done December 2012, but item 2 is new (today Steve Skidmore and Michael Wexler). --P64 (talk) 22:17, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
 * B–D F–H ✅ today. Probably that was A and N–O done December 2012, rather than A to O. --P64 (talk) 23:52, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅. --P64 (talk) 02:37, 7 March 2015 (UTC)