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This paper views Bernard Williams through the lens of the pragmatist tradition. The central insight of pragmatism is that philosophy must start with human practice, in contrast to high theory or metaphysics. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most able proponents of this insight, especially when considering the topics of ethics and the law. Williams never saw himself as a pragmatist, because he took Richard Rorty’s radical relativism to be the exemplar of the position. But I shall suggest that had Williams seen himself as a more objective pragmatist, along the lines of C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, or Frank Ramsey, he might have had the resources to settle vital issues on which he wavered, issues having to do with whether there is anything objective underpinning our deliberations.

There is controversy about how to manage requests by patients or surrogates for treatments that clinicians believe should not be administered. This multisociety statement provides recommendations to prevent and manage intractable disagreements about the use of such treatments in intensive care units. The recommendations were developed using an iterative consensus process, including expert committee development and peer review by designated committees of each of the participating professional societies (American Thoracic Society, American Association for Critical Care Nurses, American College of Chest Physicians, European Society for Intensive Care Medicine, and Society of Critical Care). The committee recommends: (1) Institutions should implement strategies to prevent intractable treatment conflicts, including proactive communication and early involvement of expert consultants. (2) The term \"potentially inappropriate\" should be used, rather than futile, to describe treatments that have at least some chance of accomplishing the effect sought by the patient, but clinicians believe that competing ethical considerations justify not providing them. Clinicians should explain and advocate for the treatment plan they believe is appropriate. Conflicts regarding potentially inappropriate treatments that remain intractable despite intensive communication and negotiation should be managed by a fair process of conflict resolution; this process should include hospital review, attempts to find a willing provider at another institution, and opportunity for external review of decisions. When time pressures make it infeasible to complete all steps of the conflict-resolution process and clinicians have a high degree of certainty that the requested treatment is outside accepted practice, they should seek procedural oversight to the extent allowed by the clinical situation and need not provide the requested treatment. (3) Use of the term \"futile\" should be restricted to the rare situations in which surrogates request interventions that simply cannot accomplish their intended physiologic goal. Clinicians should not provide futile interventions. (4) The medical profession should lead public engagement efforts and advocate for policies and legislation about when life-prolonging technologies should not be used. The multisociety statement on responding to requests for potentially inappropriate treatments in intensive care units provides guidance for clinicians to prevent and manage disputes in patients with advanced critical illness.

In my response to the five rich papers on Cambridge Pragmatism published in the current issue of the Transactions, I happily acknowledge Clifford as perhaps the first Cambridge (England) pragmatist; improve on my account of truth as adhering to habits as well as propositions; clarify my position on pragmatism and the free will debate; and speak to the need, and grounds upon which, to differentiate pragmatism from other traditions.

In this essay, I argue that Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind owes much to the little-known work of Margaret Macdonald. In 1937, Macdonald presented to Ryle her expansion of the pragmatist ideas she found in C. S. Peirce and F. P. Ramsey: (1) beliefs are dispositions; (2) there is a distinction between knowledge how and knowledge that ; and (3) laws are inference tickets or rules with which we meet the future. It is my contention that Ryle drew on, without acknowledgment, Macdonald’s presentation of these pillars of the pragmatist position. This argument will not only bring the superb analytic philosopher Margaret Macdonald back into the light where she belongs, but will also elaborate the important insights of pragmatism about generalizations, hypotheses, and causal laws, all of which remain influential.

This essay traces the evolution of the pragmatist elements in Wiggins's distinctive view of truth and shows its connections to the founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce and one of Peirce's greatest successors, F.P. Ramsey. Wiggin's pragmatism, like that of Peirce and Ramsey, is a pragmatism that attempts to arrive at what Wiggins calls ‘a sensible subjectivism’ – an account of truth that respects both the human inventiveness and the objectivity that are each a part of our search for the truth

This book elucidates and defends C.S. Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth. Peirce was interested in exploring truth’s connections to the practices of inquiry, belief, and assertion. This distinctly pragmatic project resulted in the view that truth is what would be agreed upon, were inquiry to be pursued as far as it could fruitfully go. The view that a belief is true if it would be indefeasible connects truth to human practices, but which takes truth to be something to be discovered. That is, Peirce’s view of truth is much more objectivist than some currently popular brands of pragmatism. In this expanded edition, advances in the understanding of Peirce’s theory of truth are noted, and include a new chapter which shows how Peirce’s view of truth is friendly to moral judgements.

One of Richard Rorty's legacies is to have put a Jamesian version of pragmatism on the contemporary philosophical map. Part of his argument has been that pragmatism and analytic philosophy are set against each other, with pragmatism almost having been killed off by the reigning analytic philosophy. The argument of this paper is that there is a better and more interesting reading of both the history of pragmatism and the history of analytic philosophy.

This article highlights the outcomes of COVID-19, from the perspective of surviving patients, health-care systems, and societies. It draws on first-person experience of what it is to go through and survive acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multiple organ failure. It summarizes the research on the short- and long-term outcomes for critically ill patients. The physical, cognitive, and emotional sequalae are staggering. Health-care professionals and systems will have to step up to meet the challenge of caring for large numbers of COVID-19 patients after discharge. And societies will have to step up to the ethical questions that the pandemic has made so stark. What kind of societies do we want to be, in terms of guarding the welfare of our most vulnerable citizens?

While the results of clinical research are clearly valuable in the care of critically ill patients, the limitations of such information and the role of other forms of medical knowledge for clinical decision making have not been carefully examined. The leadership of three large professional societies representing critical care practitioners convened a diverse group representing a wide variety of views regarding the role of clinical research results in clinical practice to develop a document to serve as a basis for agreement and a framework for ongoing discussion. Consensus was reached on several issues. While the results of rigorous clinical research are important in arriving at the best course of action for an individual critically ill patient, other forms of medical knowledge, including clinical experience and pathophysiologic reasoning, remain essential. No single source of knowledge is sufficient to guide clinical decisions, nor does one kind of knowledge always take precedence over others. Clinicians will find clinical research compelling for a variety of reasons that go beyond study design. While clinical practice guidelines and protocols based upon clinical research may improve care and decrease variability in practice, clinicians must be able to understand and articulate the rationale as to why a particular protocol or guideline is used or why an alternative approach is taken. Making this clinical reasoning explicit is necessary to understand practice variability. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of medical knowledge for clinical decision making and factors beyond study design that make clinical research compelling to clinicians can provide a framework for understanding the role of clinical research in practice.