Pragmatic is a philosophical concept that concerns the nature and implications of linguistic meaning. Different pragmatic theorists have focused on different properties of utterances and their context-dependence. Among the most well known are speech act theory and the theory of conversational implicature. Other important concepts include the theory that one utterance can have a variety of significant meanings or propositions in different contexts, the way the meaning of a word changes from its conventional or literal sense to its pragmatic sense, and the fact that some words are ambiguous (or indexical) with respect to certain topics.
The pragmatists argued that meaning can only be discovered by analyzing the practical and social consequences of a statement. A pragmatist’s maxim might be something like: “What’s the use of knowing that the sea is salty, if there is no way to put that knowledge to use?”
In contrast with the traditional Kantian things-in-themselves view of philosophy, the pragmatists believed that truth was not some independent and unchanging reality that could never be verified or falsified; rather, it was the result of the way a truth impacted our behavior and experience. This was the basis for their reliance on empirical and observational methods of inquiry.
Although pragmatism’s popularity grew rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s, it lost momentum as philosophy became increasingly a specialized academic discipline, with scholars focusing on more technical questions in logic, the philosophy of science, and the history of ideas. In particular, the pragmatist triumvirate of Peirce, James, and Dewey was eclipsed by their analytic counterparts, whose approach to philosophy emphasized clear language and precise logical analysis.
Despite this decline, a number of philosophers have continued to be influenced by pragmatism. A few of these, such as Richard Rorty and G.H. Mead, were true pragmatists in the tradition of Dewey and James. Others, such as Hilary Putnam and Nicholas Rescher, have adopted some of pragmatism’s themes and ideas without adopting the full pragmatist creed.
For this reason, some people refer to these philosophers as neo-pragmatists or new pragmatists. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in pragmatism. This has been facilitated by the work of a number of high-profile philosophers who have explored and selectively appropriated some of pragmatism’s most important themes and theses.
In the neo-pragmatists’ hands, pragmatism is seen as a way of dissolving intractable metaphysical and epistemological disputes by comparing them to real-world situations and asking what difference they would make if either or both theories were to be true.
A major challenge for neo-pragmatists is to distinguish between semantic information (the meaning that is encoded in an utterance) and pragmatic information (the contextually sensitive information that can be used to evaluate the meaning of an utterance). Semantic information is static; it does not change over time, as the context in which the utterance is interpreted may do. However, the dynamic character of a speaker’s intentions can influence the interpretive results from an utterance in various ways.
