A philosophy that prioritizes useful knowledge over unfalsifiable claims. The idea that reality is a construct created by humans. A pragmatic philosophy of truth that focuses on the process and function of beliefs instead of a correspondence with objective reality.
Pragmatism is a style of philosophical inquiry that is most often associated with the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). The term “pragmatism” was first pressed into service in print by William James, who presented his ideas on the subject during an 1898 address at the University of California (Berkeley), although he scrupulously swore that he had not coined the term.
For pragmatists, truth is what works. Crudely, it is “what is verified.” More formally, it is the limit toward which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief. The pragmatist approach to truth differs from other, more sophisticated theories of truth that have been advanced by such stalwarts as the American philosophers George Herbert Mead and John Dewey.
A central feature of pragmatism is the notion of meaning in context. The study of pragmatics, the branch of language studies that pragmatism evolved into, seeks to understand the way people interpret words and phrases in their social contexts. It complements the contributions that semantics and grammar make to an utterance’s meaning by taking social context into account.
You may have heard someone referred to as a pragmatic thinker for the skill they display in disambiguating meaning in everyday conversation. For instance, if your daughter says, “Eating cookies makes you gain weight,” her mother might interpret the phrase as an insult and respond negatively to the statement. This pragmatic knowledge of how to navigate ambiguity in context is known as pragmatics, and it allows you to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, and negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation.
The study of pragmatics grew out of a number of other disciplines, including sociology (the study of human society and culture), anthropology (the study of human cultures), and psychology. In particular, sociologist and pragmatist Morris Morris drew heavily from the work of George Herbert Mead in his development of pragmatism. Mead, in turn, was influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce.
Those disciplines also helped spawn the neo-pragmatic theory of truth, an extension of Peirce’s pragmatism that prioritizes useful knowledge over claims based on insufficient evidence. The neo-pragmatic theory is a significant departure from the original pragmatics in that it allows for the existence of non-correspondence truth theories that emphasize processes and functions over a rigid correspondence with objective reality. In particular, neo-pragmatism includes an endorsement of a variety of theories of truth that draw on, and draw parallels with, well-developed non-correspondence concepts like coherence, the idea that true statements are coherent as a set, and minimalism. For more information on neo-pragmatism, see: