Pragmatic is a word that gets used frequently to praise choices or actions that are considered practical, logical and reasonable. It can also be used to describe a philosophical position that takes arguments from both sides into account. It can even be applied to people, such as saying that someone is pragmatic about their political views or that they have a pragmatic view of the world.
Pragmatism is a broad philosophy that was born around 1870 in the United States and now presents a growing third alternative to analytic and Continental philosophy worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and his close associate William James. Their ideas were subsequently developed by Harvard colleagues Josiah Royce and John Dewey.
While these early pragmatists focused on theorising inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth (James especially), they did not restrict their ideas to any particular field. Their ideas have since been influenced by a number of scientific revolutions, such as evolutionary theory, in which they were keen observers and sometimes participants. The work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge in the 1920s also brought a pragmatist flavour to statistical reasoning and inquiry. Wittgenstein’s later thought likewise acquired a pragmatist flavour through conversations with Ramsey and a reading of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
A defining feature of pragmatism is that truth is relative, rather than absolute. This means that what is true in one situation may not be true in another. The idea is that we learn about the world through our everyday experiences, which are then filtered by our values and assumptions. This creates a reality that is unique to each individual and, therefore, there can be no objective or universal truth.
The philosophical tradition of pragmatism is now being revived in many places, including the USA, Britain and Italy. It is also influencing a number of fields, such as cognitive science and natural language processing. For example, computational pragmatics concerns how humans can communicate their intentions to computers with as little ambiguity as possible. This relates to the study of natural human language and information processing abilities, as well as the more general problems of semantics, which studies the relationships between sentences, the contexts in which they are spoken and the propositions that they express.
It is also being applied in fields such as behavioural therapy, where the aim is to change an individual’s way of thinking and behaving by changing their habits. This approach is often seen as more effective than trying to change the individual’s core beliefs, such as their moral or ethical principles. This is sometimes called the ‘pragmatic’ approach to behaviour change. The term ‘pragmatic’ is also used to describe a certain style of management, in which decisions are made that are considered to be practical and reasonable. This reflects the belief that the best way to get something done is by finding out what works and then doing it. This can be a very successful strategy, as long as those involved are willing to accept that they won’t achieve everything they want straight away.
