Pragmatic is a word that describes people who approach situations and problems in a practical and realistic way. Pragmatic people focus on achieving the desired outcome over adherence to abstract principles and rigid ideologies.
Often the term is used in a negative manner to refer to someone who is stubborn and unyielding, however, there are many ways to use pragmatic in a positive way. In business, a pragmatic approach can help to avoid costly mistakes and save time by focusing on what is likely to work rather than what might be idealistic. It is also a philosophical trend that focuses on determining the meaning and truth of all concepts through their practical consequences.
The concept of pragmatism gained prominence in America at around the turn of the century when the social sciences and philosophy were undergoing rapid development. John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce were influenced by pragmatism, as was George Herbert Mead, who developed a theory of action and interaction that had profound influence upon sociology and the social sciences. During this period of rapid development pragmatism suffered something of a decline, as analytic philosophy became the dominant methodological approach in Anglo-American philosophy departments.
Despite this, in recent years the pragmatic tradition has enjoyed a significant revival. In part this has been due to Richard Rorty, who turned consciously to pragmatism in an attempt to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s crucial error of naively conceiving of language and thought as mirroring the world. This in turn birthed a neopragmatism to which many philosophers have contributed, including Robert Brandom and Huw Price.
Other reasons for this resurgence of interest in pragmatism include its relevance to the philosophy of language and semantics, and its importance to the science of natural language processing (see computational pragmatics). The linguistic theories of Grice’s pragmatics are particularly influential in the discipline of utterance interpretation, while a ‘principle of relevant consequence’ is one of the core concepts in contemporary pragmatics.
The pragmatist emphasis on the significance of the real-world context of a communication has also proved highly fruitful in a number of other disciplines, most notably cognitive psychology, where it is widely used as a basis for research into communicative intentions and the interpretation of utterances. There is also a growing literature in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy, which draws heavily on pragmatic theory for its methods.
Another important area in which pragmatism is increasingly being applied is in the design of computer systems. The field of computational pragmatics seeks to develop software and languages that can more accurately ‘understand’ human communication, and to develop a system for communicating contextual knowledge to computers so that they can better approximate human information processing and linguistic abilities. This work has also been influenced by the pragmatist notion of reference resolution, which is concerned with how a computer determines whether an incoming word in a text is referring to a particular object or person. This has become an important area of application in a number of areas, including artificial intelligence and machine translation.
