{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023782980304719436, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011891490152359718, 'mean_word_length': 5.076749435665914, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Special Issue on Pragmatism and Legal ­Education – Editorial

This special issue is devoted to exploring the connections between the philosophy of pragmatism and the practices of legal education. The main idea underlying the issue is that pragmatism can be a fruitful base for criticizing and improving legal education. The contributions to the Special Issue take up different strands of pragmatist thought and apply this to a range of features of legal education. In this introduction, we provide a short background on pragmatist theory and a brief summary of the articles. The origins of this special issue lie in a special workshop on legal pragmatism during the 29th World Congress on Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in Lucerne, Switzerland. We would like to thank Michal Stambulski for co-organizing the IVR special workshop and coordinating with the authors for this special issue. American pragmatism is most widely known for its theory of truth. Although many philosophers maintain that true beliefs are justified because they ultimately depend on irrefutable foundations, pragmatists maintain that these foundations are unattainable. True beliefs are justified in virtue of their practical consequences. In this view, scientific methods should be used to test which beliefs best guide our actions. One of the founding fathers of American pragmatism, John Dewey, captures this point well in Reconstruction in Philosophy when he argues that: ‘[t]he hypothesis that works is the true one; and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that receive confirmation in their works and consequences’ (Dewey, 2008, 169-170). Pragmatists agree on the anti-foundational and experimental nature of knowledge, but disagree on whether objective truths can be reached (Bernstein, 2010, 106-113). Pragmatists in the objectivist camp, such as, for example, Dewey, maintain that objective truth exists because we use human inquiry to reach agreement on which beliefs best guide our actions. Pragmatists in the relativist camp, on the other hand, emphasize that the notion of objectivity should be abandoned given the fact that our beliefs are inherently contingent and subjective. For instance, Richard Rorty takes a relativist stance when he argues that we should not aim to establish which beliefs are objectively true, but consider which beliefs help us to foster solidarity in a community (Rorty, 1990, 22). On this basis, pragmatism also provides a theory of law. Law is seen as part of the social environment and a practice which should be evaluated on the basis of its consequences (Dewey, 1998b). It needs to be responsive to the prob-