Pragmatics is the philosophical study of the ways meaning is constructed in natural language, and how this construction relates to our understanding of the world. It has a close relationship to discourse analysis, the field that studies what people actually say and do in a conversation. It is also related to rhetoric and political science, which seek to understand how people communicate their ideas, and how this communication influences how they think and act.
In the early 1870s, several Harvard-educated men began meeting regularly for informal philosophical discussions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Metaphysical Club, as this group became known, included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), and two then-fledgling philosophers who went on to become the first self-consciously pragmatic philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a logician and mathematician, and William James (1842-1910), a psychologist with a medical degree.
The pragmatists embraced the use of scientific methods to solve problems, and the value of democratic values in the pursuit of truth. This led them to formulate the pragmatic maxim, variously formulated by Peirce and James: “that which is useful is true.”
A key strength of pragmatism is its problem-centered approach to philosophy, which allows it to focus on specific situations and explore how they might be changed. This enables it to draw on empirical evidence to support normative theories and ensures that they are attuned to the historical constraints and possibilities of a given situation.
Its weakness, however, lies in its inability to distinguish between empirical and moral issues, as well as its tendency to embrace relativistic ideas. For example, it is easy to see how a pragmatist’s view of knowledge completely implodes when applied to questions of morality, where defining what “works” often becomes a subjective matter.
In addition, pragmatism has been criticised for being incompatible with both traditional philosophy and some of the most advanced research methodologies in the social sciences, such as participant-oriented research (POR) and action research. This has resulted in a number of different approaches to pragmatism, which range from the more classical forms of the pragmatic maxim to more recent and distinctly postmodern formulations. The latter have been associated with concepts such as social constructivism and dialogic theory, and have sought to bridge the gap between the scientific method and structuralist orientation of older pragmatism and the naturalistic methods and freewheeling orientation of newer approaches. Despite these criticisms, pragmatism remains a viable philosophical option and a strong influence in the contemporary social sciences. Its popularity with researchers and practitioners continues to grow, as it provides a framework for solving real-world problems that have practical implications. This makes it a good choice for research on health, for example, as many of the problems we face in this field are multifaceted and require multiple solutions. Pragmatism also encourages collaboration between researchers and their patients, which is an essential feature of patient-oriented research. This research is usually published in academic journals and used to inform clinical practice, as well as policy development.
