The word pragmatic comes from the Latin prae, meaning “to do” or “to work.” A person is described as pragmatic when they focus on practical options and courses of action, rather than focusing solely on ideas based on their ideals. It is also used to describe a philosophical position or viewpoint that focuses on results and consequences. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines pragmatism as:
A philosophical approach to reality that stresses the need to adapt to and control it. Pragmatism is a philosophy that is characterized by a rejection of metaphysical notions of truth and existence and a commitment to the importance of change.
Unlike idealism, which emphasizes the perfectibility of human life and society, pragmatism is often critical of ideas that fail to make enough room for real life. Pragmatism also places value on the role of the individual in the molding and reshaping of reality as well as in the molding of concepts, hypotheses and theories.
Philosophers such as C. I. Lewis, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead developed rich pragmatist approaches to the social sciences, whilst pragmatist epistemology provided inspiration for a range of philosophers in the 20th century. But as the era of Deweyan pragmatism passed and analytic philosophy became the dominant paradigm, many pragmatists turned away from philosophical enquiry and focused on academic careers in their chosen disciplines.
While pragmatics may be seen as the bridge between epistemology and metaphysics, contemporary pragmatics is much more than just a criterion for meaning, an explanation of what works and a way to evaluate language, communication and utterances. It embraces a diverse set of interrelated disciplines including mathematical, computational and experimental pragmatics; theoretical and clinical pragmatics; neuropragmatics; cross-cultural and interlinguistic pragmatics; as well as history and philosophy of pragmatics.
A major objective of pragmatics is to develop a theory of meaning that goes beyond semantics, although this has become a controversial subject. Pragmatists are influenced by the notion of communicative intention, as defined by Grice, and the context-dependent nature of utterance interpretation and meaning formation.
One of the most significant developments in pragmatics is the discourse ethics espoused by Jurgen Habermas, a member of the Frankfurt School, who has drawn upon Mead’s concept of the self as irremediably social to provide a critique of instrumentalist rationality that is rampantly colonising the lifeworld. Habermas’s work has profound implications for political philosophy, ethics, ethics of law and the philosophy of religion as well as for communication studies. His approach to the philosophy of language is a model for the discipline now known as pragmatist pragmatics.
