It's interesting that Doug Belshaw takes Katherine Ryan as an example of pragmatism, as the Canadian-born British comedian often pushes against the grain to promote not just herself but women in her profession in general. Still, it goes to show that being pragmatic isn't simply following the easiest or most expedient path possible, but rather, the path most likely to lead to your objectives (the difficulty for the pragmatist, as always, is determining what is 'most likely', which is how pragmatism usually resolves into an experience-based or empiricist epistemology). What caught my eye, though, is the assertion that "we've realised that all observation is theory-laden". Now this would be taken for granted by most readers (including myself). But is it really theory that infuses our observations? I think that we don't have theories (properly so-called) about most of the things we see or feel, just the cruft that is left over from decades of previous perceptions. Like when you recognize someone; that isn't theory, that's just history. We should say that all observation is cruft-laden. That would be closer to how it actually feels.
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