Pragmatic Arguments

One pragmatic consideration I have just mentioned is that a prohibition on the exercise of self-determination— provided the prohibited group has a corresponding 

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The pragmatic arguments presented in the previous section seem to be void of theoretical content. They appear to describe mere facts. However, as London shows, some philosophical assumptions underlie them. 1 think such assumptions operate at two levels the societal, or community, and the individual. 

The focus of the pilot was on the development of a practical framework for the application of biological test methods in a Triad approach. Consequently, the selection of tools for the assessment was based on scientific and pragmatic arguments, for instance by focusing on readily available techniques for determination of the concentration of contaminants in pore water and readily available biological tests such as simple bioassays and the monitoring of soil organisms. 

Pragmatically, it had immediate and important applications in both industrial and academic laboratories, confirming the centrality of chemistry for other sciences and for society (Hoff, 1903). There were ideological benefits as well. The claim to fundamental status of thermodynamics rested in part on its asserted independence from any hypotheses about the structure of matter. The terms hypothetical and metaphysical were often terms of distaste and disapproval among nineteenth-century chemists (Brock, 1993, pp. 167—172). Thus, the use of thermodynamic arguments not only provided new tools for attacking chemical problems, but also bolstered chemistry s claim to being a proper science and the equal of physics, a subject on the minds of more than a few chemists (Nye, 1992). A similar boon accrued from the (relatively) sophisticated mathematical content of thermodynamics. 

Normally, the permeability of a porous medium can be related to other porous medium properties through a model of the porous medium structure. Pragmatically, the complexity of the flow rules out any rigorous analytical attempts to resolve the problem. Ideally, one would like to use heuristic arguments to derive an expression for k or F in terms of universal constants and easily measurable properties of the porous material and the flowing fluid. Such attempts have been made by many researchers in the past. A large collection of these studies has been... 

The attitude of most users is pragmatic. One does not worry why DF methods work and uses them as one uses other methods implemented in the same black box. There are quite a few different functionals available and one can choose between them depending on the problem that one wants to solve, where the superiority of one functional over another is usually based on statistical comparison with experiment rather than on formal arguments. This pragmatic attitude is encouraged by the fact that some of the density functionals in current use, contain parameters that were adjusted to fit experimental data. This - in order not to say more - puts DF schemes in the neighborhood of semiempirical methods. 

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