Pragmatic is the Latin term that refers to “sensible and practical.” It’s a good word to use when dealing with problems or making decisions. It’s also a word that describes people who are skilled in business or law, and is used to describe how they approach their work and conduct their affairs.
Definition
In philosophy, pragmatism is an epistemological movement that emerged from discussions around 1870 and was later popularized by William James in his 1898 lecture entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” It is a movement that emphasizes the practicality of ideas. Instead of conceiving ideas as a sort of mirror that mirrors the world, pragmatist philosophers like Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey understood them as instruments that can be used for generating and evaluating actions.
A pragmatist’s perspective on how ideas should be understood was a reaction against the Cartesian picture of language and thought, whereby all thoughts were seen as mirror images of objects. This naive picture, according to pragmatists, was a major reason why mainstream analytic philosophy failed to develop coherent, coherent views on such important topics as the nature of truth and the relation between ideas and reality.
Nevertheless, pragmatism was an important influence on many of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, including William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, G.H. Mead and Richard Rorty.
Although pragmatism was a significant force in philosophy in America during the nineteenth century, it began to lose momentum and prestige after World War II. This is due to a number of reasons, including the popularity of positivism as a dominant outlook in analytic philosophy and the rise of postmodernism as a philosophical strand.
First, pragmatism has a serious flaw when it comes to ethics and morality. Because it equates ‘acceptable results’ with ‘true’ outcomes, it can’t handle ethical issues in which the morally acceptable outcome isn’t defined by physical measurements.
Second, pragmatism has another serious flaw when it comes to experimental studies of human perception and cognition. Because the task demands of experimental studies are too often ignored, we tend to create theories of pragmatics that fail to capture the specificities of pragmatic experience as a whole.
These particularities include the way in which speakers and listeners make meaning. They are made up of a variety of factors that involve bodily, linguistic and situational components.
The particularities of pragmatic language processing are important to study because they make up the very complex way that individuals interpret verbal language in diverse contexts. These include the ways in which speakers and listeners respond to a speech or a text in terms of what they think it means, as well as how they appreciate it.
The broader goal of experimental pragmatics is to understand how people interpret and make sense of language in different situations. To achieve this, we need to attend more closely to the ways in which people perform language tasks and what they do with the information they have received. These are the aspects of ‘pragmatics’ that we should focus on when studying language and communication in the context of psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience and a range of other related fields.
