In 1906 and 1907 William James delivered a series
of lectures in Boston and New York. Those lectures later were
distilled into a paper entitled PRAGMATISM A New Name for
Some Old Ways of Thinking. In 1972 Robert Rosen began to
develop the model that resulted in the publication of his breakthrough
work Anticipatory Systems. Seven years later, with
the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Richard Rorty began to develop the interpretation of
Pragmatism, which has come to be known as neoPragmatism.
The theory of anticipatory systems as articulated
by Robert Rosen argues that the activity of anticipation occurs
through the encoding of models of the future and so, a deciduous
tree will lose its leaves upon the shortening of daylight—
an environmentally neutral event—which is the precursor to
winter. The tree anticipates (through the process of encoding
its environmental cycle) the coming of winter and diverts sap,
its lifeblood, underground to its roots and essentially hibernates
during the cold time. Rosen shows that this quality of
anticipation can be said to be the defining element of all life.
Ethics are models that encode our values and operate upon the
contingencies of the past in the adjudicatory function or the
possible contingencies of the future in the heuristic function.
Of all the mainstream ethical models pragmatism is the only
approach that expressly acknowledges that the results of our
decisions may either conflict with or harmonize with our
values. The form of pragmatism known as neo-pragmatism
looks to the communicative justification of our past or future
actions in relationship to our values to determine whether they
are good or bad. In this sense neo-pragmatism constitutes
moral anticipation, as much encoded in human society as the
dropping of leaves is encoded in a deciduous tree.

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• Neo-pragmatism: an ethical anticipatory system