Pragmatic is a philosophical tradition that conceives knowledge and language as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action rather than as mirroring or describing the world. It has a broad range of applications across many disciplines, including the sciences, philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science. The movement has undergone a number of revivals since its inception in the United States around 1870, and today it presents a growing third alternative to analytic and continental philosophy worldwide. Its founders are the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleagues Josiah Royce, William James, and others. Its key ideas are characterized by a contrast between semantics (the study of signs and the objects they denote) and pragmatics, which deals with the ‘biotic aspects of semiosis’, that is, the way signs interact with their interpreters.
The central concept of pragmatics is the notion that a speaker’s intended meanings and acts are largely determined by their particular circumstances and how they interact with each other. It is also important to understand that the meanings of utterances are shaped by their context, including what other speech acts or other actions the speaker may be engaged in at the time. In general, philosophers often distinguish between ‘near-side’ and ‘far-side’ pragmatics, the former focusing on what is expressed by the utterance itself, and the latter, examining the consequences of the utterance and what can be derived from it.
Among the most important practical applications of pragmatics is computational linguistics, which uses contextual information to better model human language and information processing abilities. A related field is natural language processing, which seeks to build computers that can process human speech and understand their meanings. Pragmatics is also important in the science of cognitive psychology, where it helps to explain how people process and learn information in their environment.
A pragmatist understanding of science also suggests that scientific theories should be subject to testing through scientific experimentation, and that a theory is true if it is useful in making scientific progress. Some pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, have taken this approach to epistemology, in the form of a kind of epistemological relativism. Other pragmatists, such as Joseph Margolis and Hilary Putnam, have also defended forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verificationism, and Quinean naturalism.
Although the work of classical pragmatists has enjoyed a recent revival, it has yet to have the same influence on contemporary philosophies in the same way as analytic and continental traditions. This is partly due to the fact that it is difficult for most people to understand, and even less so to accept, the a priori epistemological position of pragmatism. However, some pragmatists have tried to make a more systematic and coherent case for their view. For example, Robert Brandom, a distinguished scholar in the history of logic and philosophical linguistics, has attempted to articulate a unified framework for the whole movement. His version of pragmatism is not closely linked to that of the classical pragmatists, but he has incorporated their basic outlines into his own philosophy, which he calls ‘conceptual pragmatism’.
