Pragmatic is a term that describes an approach to a problem or issue that is practical and reasonable. It is often contrasted with idealism, which describes people or ideas that are overly idealistic. People who are pragmatic often take a middle of the road position on an issue rather than clinging to their principles no matter what. The word pragmatic is also used to describe an approach to a problem that takes all of the available information into account, such as choosing between a few different options or courses of action.
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, and it continues to present a growing third alternative to analytic and continental philosophy worldwide. It was first formulated by the so-called classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910), who were logicians, mathematicians, scientists, and psychologists who combined their philosophical ideas to develop the pragmatist theory of knowledge. The pragmatist philosophy has had significant non-philosophical influence in such fields as law, education, politics, sociology, and psychology, although this article deals only with it as a philosophical movement within philosophy.
A central feature of pragmatism is its focus on the idea that an ideology or proposition is true only if it works satisfactorily in practice, and that it is useless to argue over unworkable or unreasonable ideas. Thus pragmatists advocate a method of philosophizing based on experience and experiment, and they regard truth as a relative rather than an absolute concept. The pragmatist doctrine has had a wide-ranging impact on many fields, including the sciences, the social sciences, and the arts, but it has become particularly prominent in American philosophy and the philosophy of language.
While a number of philosophers have developed varying views of pragmatism, most adhere to at least some of its fundamental principles. The pragmatist view of truth and the philosophy of language are especially influential, as is Peirce’s concept of a ‘citizenship of inquiry’. The discourse ethics developed by Habermas is a major contribution to contemporary philosophy, and his work has had a substantial influence on the philosophy of law, social science and religion, as well.
Another notable pragmatist is Robert Brandom, who has contributed to the philosophy of language, semantics and the philosophy of mind. Although he shares some of the same concerns as the classical pragmatists, such as rejecting the ‘perlocutionary force’ of language, and insisting that’saying’ and ‘doing’ are interconnected, he also differs from them in many respects. He is influenced by a variety of other philosophers, including the logicians Wilfrid Sellars and Quine, as well as his teacher Richard Rorty. He has also been heavily influenced by the analytic philosophers Moore and Wittgenstein, as well as the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. Thus his work is a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy. He has also developed a formal treatment of pragmatics, which connects classical semantics (treating propositional contents as either true or false) with intuitionistic semantics (dealing with the illocutionary forces). This formalism allows a way to bridge the gap between these two approaches to the study of meaning in language.
