Pragmatic is a philosophy that understands knowledge of the world as inseparable from the ability to act within it. It has attracted a wide range of interpretations and applications, including the idea that philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true only if it is useful, that experience consists in transacting with nature rather than representing it, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’, and that truth lies in the success of communicative action. Pragmatism is associated with a broad range of liberal social ideals and has been influential in philosophy of religion, politics, ethics, moral philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of law and political science, among other fields.
The term pragmatic is derived from the Greek pragmatikos, meaning “practical,” and its root is praxis, or “to do.” People are often told to be more pragmatic in their choices and actions, particularly when they are not getting the results they desire. Taking a more pragmatic approach usually means that one is willing to compromise between their theoretically ideal outcome and the realistic options or courses of action they can actually take.
In the linguistic and related field of pragmatics, the study of how context contributes to meaning, Pragmatics has become a central concern. Linguists who specialize in this area are called pragmaticians. The discipline is a subfield of the Philosophy of Language and a member of the International Pragmatics Association. Pragmatics includes far-side pragmatics (such as semantic, lexical and grammatical considerations), near-side pragmatics (including interactional and communicative), intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, clinical pragmatics, and neuropragmatics.
It is also possible to incorporate a pragmatist framework into analytic philosophy. This has been done by a number of philosophers, most famously, Cornel West, who advanced a ‘prophetic pragmatism’ drawing on Christian and Marxist thought, and Shannon Sullivan, who pioneered ‘whiteness studies’. The pragmatist perspective is also widely applied in a variety of liberatory social movements such as gender studies, disability studies, medical ethics and Native American philosophy.
The pragmatist tradition also influenced other philosophical traditions, most notably with John Dewey’s ‘pragmatic idealism’, which was largely ignored until the 1990s, when scholars began to reclaim it. A new generation of ‘pragmatist idealists’ have incorporated Dewey’s ideas into their own philosophical perspectives in such areas as the philosophy of religion, ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of science. Their work is developing into a more robust form of pragmatic idealism, inspired by both Dewey and William James. This is now a significant school of philosophy. This development marks the end of the era of classical pragmatism. Its progressive social ideals lived on, however, in many quarters. For example, a ‘pragmatic’ approach has been used to support the concept of racial and cultural justice in the work of George Herbert Mead (1900). Other important contributions include those made by feminism (Seigfried 1996) and medical ethics (Norton 1994). These are considered part of the ‘new pragmaticism’.
