Pragmatic is a way of understanding context and meaning that goes beyond ‘literal’ meaning. It is a set of principles and rules that we use to make sense of the world around us, and that are constantly being influenced by our environment, the people we interact with, and their beliefs, values and goals.
A number of famous philosophers have contributed to pragmatism. Most notably, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the British philosopher William James were the founders of this school of thought. Their ideas emerged in discussions at the ‘Metaphysical Club’ at Harvard and were later published. They promoted a form of ‘pragmatist’ epistemology and were instrumental in moving the philosophical debate away from metaphysical arguments about the nature of truth and reality to more concrete issues of knowledge and practicality.
While pragmatism’s influence has declined over time, it continues to play an important role in many areas of philosophy and science. For example, the ‘pragmatic maxims’ developed by the pragmatic philosopher Paul Grice form part of everyday language processing and are fundamental to the study of conversational pragmatics. They include:
For instance, many voters will take into account a politician’s pragmatic approach to a situation when casting their vote. They will be looking for someone who can remain calm and think logically instead of being swayed by fear or heightened emotions in a stressful situation. This type of person is said to be pragmatic, but can they also be described as dogmatic?
Pragmatism is also a very useful framework for navigating qualitative research. For example, pragmatist approaches to research can help researchers to avoid being overly theoretical and to focus more on their research questions than on the methods used to answer them. This can be a challenging aspect of qualitative research, particularly when dealing with complex situations such as organizational change.
This can be accomplished by using a technique called abduction (see Morgan et al, 2014b). This involves going from observations to theory, instead of starting with a set of assumptions and then deducing what you expect to see (deduction) or drawing conclusions based on the results of past studies and applying these to your own observations (induction).
The pragmatist perspective offers a powerful approach to addressing complex problems and developing rich empirical and contextual understandings of the world in which we live. Its importance should not be overlooked in a world where our global challenges continue to grow in complexity and urgency. The examples of the two NGOs featured in this article illustrate some of the ways that a pragmatic approach can be applied to research, including in the design and collection of data, analysis of data and dissemination of findings. It can also be helpful in navigating the often thorny process of conducting qualitative applied social research with non-governmental organisations.
