Pragmatic is a word used to describe someone or something that is practical, reasonable, or sensible. It is often contrasted with idealistic. Many people have a pragmatic approach to life, where they try to balance their goals with the realities of daily living. A pragmatic person may take a middle of the road position on an issue, considering arguments from both sides before making a decision. In philosophy, pragmatism refers to an epistemological framework that prioritizes experience over dogmatic belief.
A pragmatic approach is often more successful than an idealistic one. For example, a politician who wants to save wildlife might choose to settle a lawsuit rather than fight it in court. A pragmatic approach is also often used by businesses, as it saves money and time.
The term pragmatic is used in a wide variety of fields, including business, psychology, and philosophy. It is most commonly used to refer to someone or something that is practical, reasonable, and sensible. It is often contrasted with idealism, which refers to a desire for perfect or ideal outcomes.
While the philosophies of Dewey and Peirce are the best known in North America, there are a wide range of scholars who have developed the ideas of pragmatism in other countries, especially in Europe and Asia. The work of the pragmatists has broad appeal across the discipline of philosophy, as well as other fields such as sociology, cognitive science, and communication studies.
One of the primary tenets of pragmatism is that knowledge is always incomplete and in flux. This does not necessarily entail a globalized skeptical attitude, as some have suggested (as opposed to scientific skepticism). Instead, pragmatism argues that the only way we can make sense of the world is through experience.
Pragmatism’s philosophy of language is known as pragmatics, and it focuses on the ways that context-dependent factors affect meaning. It is closely related to discourse analysis, and is particularly helpful in understanding how ambiguity and vagueness can be navigated. Pragmatics is a crucial component of understanding how humans communicate with one another.
Most pragmatists do not reject the possibility of formal logic, but are critical of its pretensions to ultimate validity. They view it as just one of many tools that can be used in reasoning, along with intuition and common sense.
William James’s metaphysics of pragmatism emphasizes that something is true only insofar as it works, not as a claim to objective reality. For James, this included religious experiences such as prayer.
More recently, the pragmatist framework of thought has been embraced by philosophers in other disciplines. For example, Jurgen Habermas has incorporated pragmatism into his critique of the neo-Marxian rationality that dominates modern society. In the field of social philosophy, he has developed the concept of communicative action as a means to counteract the dominance of instrumentalist ideas that have infected the Western world.
