Pragmatic is an adjective that describes someone who makes decisions based on real-world circumstances and doesn’t get stuck on big-picture ideals or emotions. This person is capable of remaining calm and thinking logically in stressful situations. A pragmatic person is not afraid to make compromises when necessary. The word pragmatic stems from the Greek words pragmatikos and praxis, which both mean practical. A pragmatist would agree with Oscar Wilde’s maxim, “only shallow people judge by appearances.”
The concept of pragmatism dates back to 1870 in the US and continues to present an alternative to both analytic and continental philosophy. It was first articulated by a group of Harvard-educated men called the Metaphysical Club. Members included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two then-fledgling philosophers who became the classical pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), logician, mathematician, and scientist; and William James (1842-1910), psychologist and moralist.
Classical pragmatists developed a novel a posteriori epistemology that is different from traditional empiricism. They also developed a pragmatist theory of knowledge that differs from the commonsense notion that truth is correspondence between thought and reality. To prove the truth of a proposition, a pragmatist would simply have to demonstrate that it works for human beings. For example, a person crossing a forest to exit may use any path that gets them across successfully without being attacked or hurt. Whether that person crawls through the brush or cuts through the foliage is irrelevant because it still gets them to the other side. Similarly, any thought that provides useful information about the world will be considered true by a pragmatist.
Modern pragmatism focuses on the nature of language and how we interpret it. Pragmatics is the field that studies language in this context and it takes social, cultural, and situational factors into account. It is a form of functional semantics that focuses on implied meanings as well as the social and contextual implications of an utterance.
In addition to focusing on linguistics, pragmatism is also a general philosophical movement that considers the consequences of ideas and concepts rather than their formal characteristics. In other words, it seeks to answer the question: What do our thoughts and beliefs actually do for us? It is a philosophical trend that determines the meaning and truth of all concepts through their practical consequences.
This type of pragmatism was advocated by philosophers such as William James and John Dewey. In fact, Dewey’s wide-ranging writings had significant influence on American intellectual life for a half century. However, after Dewey’s death, pragmatism lost some momentum and was largely ignored by analytic philosophers until the 1980s. Since then, a growing number of philosophers have revived the classical pragmatist tradition in the hope that it can bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. For this reason, it is important to understand what pragmatism is and how it can be applied to other fields of inquiry.
