Pragmatic is a philosophy that stresses the importance of assessing real-world circumstances and making practical decisions. It is often a counterpoint to dogmatism, which emphasizes sticking to certain beliefs and morals even when faced with contrary evidence. Those who are pragmatic can find solutions to complex problems more easily because they focus on the realities of the situation rather than what could or should be. Pragmatic can also be a verb meaning to be practical or to make realistic decisions, or a noun referring to someone who is practical or down to earth.
The field of pragmatism developed from a series of philosophical debates over the nature of knowledge, value, and reality. The pragmatists rejected a number of traditional assumptions of the time. They believed that knowledge is not innately acquired and is not objective; it is a process of struggle with the surrounding environment. They also argued that the process of struggle with the world is what gives reality its meaning.
Philosophers such as John Dewey, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce are considered to be classical pragmatists. Their wide-ranging writings had a significant impact on American intellectual life for about half a century. Their philosophies helped to give rise to the modern study of education, public administration, and many other fields.
While pragmatism has had many critics, it is a major influence in the fields of philosophy of language, rhetoric and semiotics, semantics, and philosophical logic. Pragmatists are critical of the pretension to ultimate validity of formal logic and view it as one tool among others, such as intuition, experience, and common sense.
Pragmatics is a scientific discipline that focuses on the nature of meaning in context and the effects that context has on the interpretation of speech and other forms of communication. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for semiotics, but it is important to distinguish the two disciplines.
Unlike the theory of linguistic semantics, which is concerned with determining what a word means in a particular semiotic context, pragmatics is more concerned with how a message is understood in a specific communication situation. It studies how a speaker’s identity, the specific context of their utterance, their intentions, and their actions communicate information to their listeners.
The large literature on pragmatic development has long resisted a neat synthesis. This is partly because it straddles the boundary between linguistic and cognitive processes, and because the phenomena involved are both complex and dynamic. This is not to say that the research has been inconclusive, but that it has emphasized the difficulty of finding a single theoretical framework to bring together all the relevant issues.
