Pragmatic focuses on the way people use language in real-world situations. It’s about what’s effective rather than what’s logical or right. People who are pragmatic are results oriented and are willing to compromise for the best outcome. They know that sometimes they have to give a little to get a lot. They can see how a situation will play out and know when they should be flexible and when they should stick to the plan.
The term ‘pragmatic’ has been used in philosophy since the 1870s, as a critique of the idealism that had become popular at the time. It became a movement with its own distinct ideas and influenced many philosophers, psychologists, and literary writers. Pragmatism presents a third alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Its first generation was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, who authored influential texts and developed their ideas, though they disagreed about many issues, including how pragmatism should be conceived. Their ideas were further cultivated by their Harvard colleagues Josiph Royce, who was an advocate of absolute idealism, and William James’ son Alfred North Whitehead, who championed scientific philosophy and evolutionary theory.
Peirce’s central concept was the Pragmatic Maxim, a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their practical consequences – their implications for experience in specific situations. This gave rise to a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian ‘a posteriori’ understanding of the norms that govern inquiry. It also produced a pragmatic methodology, an ‘experientialist’ approach to philosophy that emphasizes the importance of experience and going by the facts, rather than relying on a priori principles appealed to by the tender-minded.
In general, the pragmatists differed over whether the Maxim should be seen as a rule for determining truth or as a principle of identifying empty disputes. They also varied about the extent to which their philosophy should conceive itself as a science of nature with monism about truth (following Peirce) or as a broad-based alethic pluralism (following James and Dewey).
Contemporary pragmatics is largely defined by its focus on ‘near-side’ phenomena, that is, the nature of certain facts relevant to the characterization of what speakers mean when they say something, such as the degree to which a semantically ’empty’ statement can be interpreted as conveying some fact. Relevance theorists are largely responsible for contemporary pragmatics’ tendency to focus on what is conveyed beyond saying, but this has caused it to run into controversy with other approaches, such as those of speech act theorists and linguists who argue that near-side pragmatics should be considered a subset of the more broadly focused field of semantics.
