Pragmatic people prefer to take a pragmatic approach to life. This means they are more concerned with a practical solution that works for the immediate situation than trying to achieve some abstract ideal. This is why they often say things like, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This pragmatic mindset allows them to be more efficient and practical in their day-to-day activities. For example, if they are doing hypnosis on a patient, they will assess which techniques will be most effective for the specific issue. This saves time and increases the chances of a successful treatment.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that – very broadly – understands knowledge as inseparable from agency within the world, and that understanding the world is best accomplished by making sense of it (or, put more simply, by acting in it). This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and sometimes contrary range of interpretations. These include the view that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that truth is only useful if it can be used to make sense of the world, that our experiences lie on a deep bed of shared human practices that cannot be fully ‘made explicit’, and that language consists primarily of a form of ‘interactional’ signification.
In the last century, two broad currents of neo-pragmatism emerged. One, associated with Rorty, flirts with relativism and hints that truth is not the important concept it has long been taken to be; the other, more commonly associated with Wittgenstein, takes a neo-pragmatist stance toward truth by arguing that it is only truly meaningful in a context – or, put more simply, when it is being used – and that therefore it is best understood as a function rather than as a concept.
Both of these views have been influential. A large part of the work in the philosophy of science and in ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy owes at least some debt to them. More recently, Brandom’s exposition of the ‘community of inquiry’ concept and his discussion of how to reconcile Sellarsian and pragmatist ideas have inspired a new generation of philosophers to fruitfully combine analytic and pragmatist approaches.
Pragmatic teaching in the classroom is usually linked to language functions and is designed to help learners determine the best way to communicate in a particular situation. For example, a teacher might use a lesson about how to apologize in different cultures and in different languages, or how to give feedback in different situations. Teachers may also add a pragmatic component to their classroom instruction by focusing on the ways that students communicate with each other in the class. This includes a range of social and emotional skills such as empathy, negotiation and compromise. This can be an excellent way to develop a student’s pragmatic competence in a multicultural society. This kind of learning is also known as social-pragmatics.