Pragmatic (from Latin pragma, meaning “agreement”) is a philosophy which promotes a stance of moderation in the pursuit of knowledge. The word is also used to refer to a person who is pragmatic, meaning that they consider the consequences of their actions and decisions for all involved parties.
The pragmatist philosophy has provided rich contributions to many areas of philosophical inquiry, both in its classical era and right up to the present day. Some of the most significant pragmatist developments have been in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. However, pragmatism has also contributed to social philosophy, aesthetics, political philosophy, ethics and cognitive psychology.
Pragmatism has its roots in the United States, and presents a third alternative to analytic and ‘Continental’ traditions. Its first generation was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and his friends William James and Josiah Royce. These pragmatists developed an original a posteriori epistemology and a pragmatic philosophy of science, which placed the scientific method above pure philosophizing. They theorised a general theory of signs and the community of inquirers, and sought to apply this to a wide range of philosophical issues.
Semantics, the study of the signification of words in their contexts, was a major focus of the classic pragmatists. Contemporary pragmatic philosophers, however, approach the study of language in very different ways. Some ‘literalists’ view semantics as basically autonomous, without any pragmatic intrusion; others, ‘contextualists’ adopt the basic outlines of Relevance Theory, while perhaps demurring on some of its details and psychological orientation; and still other scholars are exploring a new and fertile area called ‘critical pragmatism’, which draws on Peircean ideas and the philosophy of Hegel and Wittgenstein to explore a theory of meaning and truth in a more linguistically grounded way.
Philosophical Pragmatics
Pragmatist philosophical thought has made rich contributions to the study of language and human communication. The most influential of these has been the work of Gricean pragmatics, which is still a major area of research today. Other important approaches are speech act theory, the theory of conversational implicature, and lexico-semantic analysis.
The practical approach to solving problems is often more successful than the idealistic, entrenched viewpoints of some people. For example, a pragmatic decision to settle a lawsuit is often less expensive and less stressful than a drawn-out legal battle.
In the later 20th century, the Frankfurt School of philosophical thought produced a number of pragmatist-inspired philosophers, including the neo-Marxian and hermeneutical Jurgen Habermas, who is arguably the most widely read pragmatist in the world. His concept of communicative action combines the analytic philosophers’ goal of systematically theorising language with a neo-Marxian hermeneutic and critical analysis of modern society, whilst drawing on Mead’s pragmatist notion of the self as irremediably social. It is a powerful and compelling philosophy for our times.
