Pragmatic is a word that describes choices and actions that take practical considerations into account. It is sometimes used in political discussions to refer to a middle of the road position that takes arguments from both sides into account. Pragmatic also applies to approaches to a situation that try to find the best solution given the circumstances.
The philosophical movement known as pragmatism has been influential in a number of different disciplines and has contributed to the development of many philosophers. The main areas that pragmatism has touched on are logic, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. It has also helped shape the way that people approach and think about language.
For example, a pragmatic view on the nature of truth is one that accepts that all we can know for certain is what has actually happened. This makes it impossible to argue that one system of society is better than another without knowing how people live in both.
Philosophers who have adopted the pragmatist view on epistemology have called it radical empiricism. The main tenets of this approach are that knowledge is only valuable when it proves useful and the process of acquiring and assessing knowledge is a struggle with the world. The pragmatist view of art is one that emphasizes the need to experience artwork as something that has value in itself rather than simply as a record of an artist’s skill.
Similarly, the approach to ethics that pragmatists have taken has focused on how people deal with situations that require ethical decisions. It has also challenged some of the orthodoxies about morality that were established by earlier thinkers. For example, pragmatism has been critical of utilitarianism and its assertion that only what helps the most people is good.
As a result, it has led to newer theories of morality that have made room for a greater variety of options that consider the impact of an action on a person as well as on others. Pragmatists have also contributed to debates about the limits of science and about the question of whether or not it is possible for scientific inquiry to degrade all that is meaningful into merely physical phenomena. This has been the subject of the works of John Dewey in Experience and Nature and Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Pragmatics is a field that studies how language can be understood in context, especially the implications of an utterance on its hearer. It is a linguistic discipline that studies the context-dependent nature of linguistic meaning and is broadly distinguished from semantics which deals with the notion of propositional content (for example, that the phrase “Elwood put his hands on Eloise” means “Elwood touched Eloise”). There are many branches of pragmatics including conversational pragmatics, speech act theory and pragmatic theory. There is a growing trend towards integrating formal and experimental forms of pragmatics with other fields of study such as information structure analysis, modal logic and theoretical semantics.
