Pragmatic is an approach to meaning in context, a way of understanding how ambiguity is resolved, negotiated and navigated in language and communication. This focuses on practical, everyday knowledge of how to do things like politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines in conversation and negotiate turn-taking norms in social situations. Pragmatics also includes an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation and provides a framework for the study of communication and language.
Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870 and is today a growing third alternative to both analytic and Continental ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its key ideas were developed by the ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James, along with their friend Josiah Royce (1855-1916). They worked within an empiricism that was already well established at the time, but were keen to apply it to the scientific revolution then taking place in evolutionary biology and beyond, including the nascent field of sociology.
The classical pragmatists were also interested in questions of inquiry and the nature of truth and put these themes to work in debates about religion, philosophy of science, art and education. They were influenced by the social-democratic thinking of John Dewey (1859-1952) and his ‘Chicago Club’, which included Mead and Angell, with whom they shared a commitment to social reform.
In the twentieth century pragmatism suffered a decline, largely because of the success of analytic philosophy in Anglo-American university departments. However, it has recently experienced a revival, spearheaded by Richard Rorty (1931-2007) in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature who made ambitious claims about the prospects for a pragmatic epistemology. This sparked a movement known as neopragmatism, to which a number of influential recent philosophers have contributed (see Carston 2005 for more detail).
Contemporary pragmatists are concerned with a variety of topics in philosophy and the humanities including art, ethics, philosophy of religion, cultural studies, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and political philosophy. They are also interested in the role of pragmatics in areas such as health and medicine, law and the workplace.
A central theme for most of these pragmatists is that we cannot know the nature of reality or even our own experience except by how it is experienced. This makes it difficult to make objective judgements about how we should live our lives. Moreover, the pragmatic approach to meaning and truth allows for the possibility that our most important beliefs might be false. Pragmatists therefore believe that we should be open to the possibility of being wrong and, more importantly, that it is worth examining our ideas about the world and our place in it, no matter how they are held. For this reason, the pragmatic view of truth is often called ‘radical empiricism’. This is also the approach that underpins much of cognitive behavioral therapy.
