Pragmatic is a word that’s used to describe someone who’s concerned with the results of their actions and not so much about following idealistic principles. For example, you might hear someone say, “We need a candidate who’s pragmatic and can get things done in the real world–not some idealist who will never compromise.” Pragmatic is also the root of many other words such as pragmatism, pragmatics, praxis, and pragmatist.
In philosophy, Pragmatic is a philosophical school that emphasizes the importance of practical consequences in making decisions about beliefs, values, and policies. In particular, pragmatism places a high value on what people actually do in the real world and how they are affected by their environment. This is a broad philosophical approach that has rich applications across various areas of the world, including science, law, and education.
Philosophers who are known as pragmatists include Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Originally, pragmatism was a broad outlook on the formation of concepts, hypotheses, and theories that was supported by a critical objective of determining their functional efficacy in serving human needs and interests. It also promoted a form of alethic pluralism regarding truth and knowledge as opposed to an epistemological monism (as pursued by Peirce) or an a priori foundationalism (as advocated by James and Dewey).
Later pragmatists expanded the scope of the philosophy to encompass a variety of topics in different fields. For example, linguistic pragmatics attempts to understand the relationship between what speakers actually do with their words, the specific circumstances in which they use them, their intentions, and how they are able to successfully communicate with one another.
More recently, neopragmatists have developed more sophisticated models of language and meaning. For example, Donald Davidson and Ruth Anna Putnam have developed models of semantic pragmatics that can help us to better understand how the meaning of words is determined by their contexts, the utterers’ intents, and their effects on speakers and listeners.
In fact, the field of pragmatics has grown so complex that there are now a wide range of subfields: formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; game-theoretic and experimental pragmatics; clinical and neuropragmatics; intercultural and interlinguistic pragmatics and more. This is part of what makes it a fascinating and important area of research.
A key aspect of pragmatism is its rejection of sharp dichotomies. For example, classical pragmatists such as James and Peirce rejected dichotomies between fact and value, thought and experience, mind and body, analytic and synthetic, and so on. This was a core element of pragmatism’s promise to overcome the pragmatic dilemma that James identified in 1907 as a clash between two ways of thinking.
