Pragmatic is a word that can be used to describe people who take the most practical approach to situations. This is in contrast to dogmatic, which describes people who rely on specific rules. People who are pragmatic in their actions can often handle stressful situations better because they don’t get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. This is why many businesses and politicians are considered to be pragmatic.
The origins of pragmatism date back to the Metaphysical Club, an informal group of Harvard-educated philosophers in the early 1870s. Its members included future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) and two self-styled pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a logician and mathematician, and William James (1842-1910), who was also a psychologist.
These pragmatists were the first to define a new philosophy called “pragmatism” as an approach to thought that focused on real-life experience. The central tenet of pragmatism is that truth is an emergent property of the process of inquiry. In his essay on “The Empirical Method,” John Dewey (1859-1952) described this process as one of judging a system by its consequences in a concrete context.
The philosophy of pragmatism is now an increasingly popular way to view the world. It is often used by people who are interested in applying philosophical concepts to their everyday lives. In addition to being an academic philosophy, pragmatism is widely used in many different fields such as law, business and education.
As a result of this widespread interest in pragmatics, there is now a growing tendency for work in the field to include experimental data. These experiments typically present participants with a series of stimuli that represent independent variables. Then, they compute the averages of how well people perform on each task under various conditions. However, it is important to remember that these averages are based on within-individual variance that varies across people, between subjects, and over time.
While this is a useful descriptive statistic, it does not tell us much about the complex, individual meanings that people make in different contexts. Experimental pragmatics needs to attend more closely to these varying, bodily, linguistic and situational factors that make up human pragmatic experiences.
Among the most prominent contemporary pragmatists is Robert Brandom (1928-). He joins Peirce and James in denying that truth is a substantive metaphysical property, and in seeking to reconstruct an account of reference that makes a difference in practice. However, his pragmatism is not without criticism. He has criticized the classical pragmatists as focusing on language and not enough on the wider issues of human meaning-making. He argues that they failed to adequately address the ‘internal context’ of linguistic meaning-making (Brandom, 2011).
