Pragmatic is an adjective that means “realistic” or “down to earth.” It can also describe someone who makes decisions based on practical, real-world circumstances rather than big-picture ideals. For example, if your friend says they love you but you don’t have enough money to go out with them right now, a pragmatic solution is for you to ask them to meet later so you can see them.
The philosophical concept of pragmatism is more complex than the simple description given above. A broad range of different pragmatic approaches have been developed, and there are numerous subfields within pragmatics, including formal and computational; theoretical and applied; game-theoretic, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural, interlinguistic and even neuropragmatics.
The pragmatist philosophers are all united by their rejection of the idea that any one form of logic or language is inherently superior to another. Instead, they argue that each language is a tool that can be used to accomplish certain kinds of tasks. This is sometimes called a pragmatic theory of language.
For example, the pragmatic linguist Robert Stainton defends counterexamples that involve non-sentential assertions — such as an utterance of “I am completely insane” – from criticism by defenders of orthodox pragmatism. He argues that such usage is not a violation of the logical form of language but rather the result of the linguistic task being performed (or, as he puts it, “the way in which the language in question is ‘used to work’”).
A related pragmatic approach is that of relevance theory. This is a philosophy of communication in which speakers must take into account the meanings that other speakers have already attributed to their utterances when making an interpretation. Mandy Simons writes about this in her paper “Presupposition and Relevance.”
In the pragmatic context, a relevant interpretation is one that can be justified by referring back to the original utterance or to some other linguistic facts about it. This is the approach taken by James and John Dewey in their writings on pragmatism, as well as by G. H. Mead and others.
Some pragmatists have criticized the possibility of doing formal logic, although this view has not gained much support in recent years. Others have embraced formal logic as one of many logical tools, but have argued that its claims to ultimate validity are misguided and therefore flawed. This is a common view in the philosophy of science, though it is not the only view on which there are pragmatic arguments.
Other pragmatic approaches have focused on the notion of truth. A neo-pragmatic view, associated with Richard Rorty, flirts with relativism and imply that the idea of truth is not as important as it has been made out to be in the past. By contrast, a view inspired by Peirce and James, and promoted by Dewey and others, views truth as an objectively valuable concept that can be validated. This is a view that is in the tradition of classical pragmatism, but with an updated emphasis on social and scientific issues.
