A pragmatist is someone who believes that you should always consider the consequences of your actions and try to find an effective course of action. For example, if your friend asks you to join them for lunch but you know that it will be a waste of time because you’re trying to get work done, you might choose to decline. Pragmatic people are careful to weigh up the pros and cons of their decisions and take the most practical route.
You’re likely familiar with the concept of pragmatics as it’s used in linguistic studies, but you may not be aware that it’s also central to philosophical thought. The field of pragmatics studies how meaning is determined by the physical or social context in which it is uttered, and how that influences what the speaker intends to communicate. It’s a broad topic that encompasses several subfields, such as semantics, syntax, and semiotics.
For example, a mother and daughter might be talking about food, but the mother’s use of “candies” to describe her friend could be interpreted as sarcasm or insult. This is because the mother hasn’t considered the implications of her words on her friend, which is a form of pragmatics. Semantics, on the other hand, studies the rules that determine the literal linguistic meaning of expressions, while syntax deals with how to combine words and sentences to convey meaning.
In the realm of philosophy, pragmatism is a tradition that can be traced back to a group of Harvard-educated men who met informally in the early 1870s. This group included proto-pragmatist Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two philosophers who would become the first self-conscious pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
Classical pragmatists such as these helped to lay the foundation for an original a posteriori epistemology, and they also contributed to other areas of philosophy such as ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. As analytic philosophy became dominant in most Anglo-American philosophy departments, pragmatism suffered a decline in popularity, but it has undergone a significant revival since the 1970s.
A key figure in this revival has been Richard Rorty, who turned consciously to pragmatism to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s crucial error of naively conceiving of language and thought as mirroring the world. In particular, he wanted to emphasize the value of experience over ideas and the importance of contextual considerations in determining what is true or false.
Other important pragmatic thinkers in recent times include Robert Brandom, who developed a theory of meaning and truth that can be seen as a bridge between the classical pragmatists and the analytic philosophies that came after them. His theories are influenced by the likes of Wilfrid Sellars and Quine, as well as historical readings in thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. Unlike classical pragmatists, he focuses less on the theory of meaning itself and more on how different vocabularies understood pragmatically might be converted into one another.
