Pragmatic
A pragmatic person is someone who weighs the benefits of a practical action against its cost and who prioritizes outcomes. For example, a pragmatic person might decide to leave work early when there is a snowstorm forecast. They might also keep an extra set of keys made (and leave them with friends or family) so they are able to get into their house if the car won’t start. They might also bring an umbrella when going out in rainy Seattle.
The pragmatists believed that truth and value were determined by the effect of human actions on reality, that knowledge was fallible and that human understanding is a process of discovery rather than of infallible propositional truth. They sought to make the principles of philosophical pragmatism as useful as possible for people in their lives and to apply them as broadly as they could to different situations.
Pragmatism was a major force in the American intellectual scene of the 20th Century, with influential pragmatists including John Dewey (1863-1931), James G. Mead (1934) and W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963). In the philosophy of language, pragmatics focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions in particular contexts and the strategies that listeners use to figure out what these mean. This is different from the study of semantics, which focuses on what words actually mean in a literal sense.
There are a number of contemporary philosophies that look to pragmatics for inspiration and guidance, including the ‘New Pragmatism’ of William James, John L. Austin, Richard Rorty and others. More recently, it has been embraced by philosophers in the philosophy of science, philosophy of law and the social sciences, and has also become central to many liberatory philosophical projects in areas such as feminism, ecology, Native American and Latin American philosophy.
The New Pragmatists have tended to focus attention on the practical or applied aspects of pragmatism, and have also been associated with postmodernism. Some philosophers have argued that this neglects the core of classical pragmatism and has led to a misreading of its ideas.
To address this, the pragmatics movement has been developing a theory of meaning that is more central to classical pragmatism. This theory identifies four general pragmatic maxims, which appear to be universally valid in most languages and most situations: Be informative. Say what you intend to say, and say it clearly. Be polite. Avoid hurting other people’s feelings. Be consistent. Say what you mean, and do what you say you will do. These are essentially the same as the principles of traditional pragmatics, but with added emphasis on clarity and consistency. This version of pragmatics may be called ‘cooperative pragmatics’. It is not to be confused with the more traditional ‘Gricean pragmatics’, which is focused on the use of grammatical and perlocutionary constraints on communication.
