Pragmatic is a philosophical school that develops theories of meaning and communication. It consists of a wide range of philosophical views, with significant contributions in many areas of philosophy. The main pillars of pragmatism are Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, William James’s pragmatic theory of truth and Dewey’s concept of the social infinite. In addition, many analytic philosophers of the 20th century have been pragmatists, including Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Other pragmatist philosophers of the current day include Susan Haack, Robert Brandom and Jurgen Habermas.
The pragmaticists are sceptical of the ultimate validity of any logical system and they prefer a theory of meaning that is context-sensitive. This means that the ‘truth-conditions’ of an utterance are to be found in the conventions that apply to its use, rather than its semantically-determined content. Peirce believed that if we had a complete definition of any term, we would never learn anything new about it; instead he sought a higher level of clarity (the ‘pragmatic maxim’) that enabled us to discover these context-sensitive features by studying how the terms were actually used in communication.
Another feature of pragmatism is its ‘intentional stance’, which claims that the content of an utterance is always influenced by the intention of the speaker and the ‘context’ in which the utterance was made. This is a different view from the traditional ‘ontological position’, in which the truth of an utterance is judged by the meaning that its sign bears and the objects that it refers to.
In the early 1900s, pragmatism enjoyed a brief vogue in American philosophy. In his lectures on ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking’, William James identified an underlying paradox in the history of philosophical thought that pragmatism was set to resolve. In a sense, he saw the history of philosophy as a constant clash between two ways of thinking: the ‘tough-minded’ empiricists who go by ‘the facts’ and the ‘tender-minded’ advocates of a priori principles that appeal to ratiocination.
Pragmatics and its sister disciplines of semiotics, semantics and rhetoric have continued to be of great interest to philosophers. The eminent analytic philosopher Quine, for example, had a qualified enthusiasm for parts of the pragmatist heritage and, in particular, for Peirce’s pragmatic maxim.
A more recent development has been the resurgence of a ‘neo-pragmatism’ in which a wide variety of contemporary high-profile philosophers have explored and selectively appropriated the themes and ideas embedded in this rich tradition. Examples are Richard Rorty, who strove to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s fatal error of naively conceiving that language and thoughts mirror the world, which spawned his iconoclastic ‘pragmatism’; and Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Robert Brandom, Susan Haack and Jurgen Habermas, all of whom have been praised for their originality and depth of thinking. They have been complemented by a growing international network of pragmatist scholars in the fields of philosophy, politics, ethics and law. They have argued that the pragmatic maxim has a role to play in both public policymaking and the philosophy of education.
