Pragmatic is a philosophy that offers a third alternative to traditional analytic and continental philosophical traditions. It emerged in the 1870s in discussions among members of a so-called ‘Metaphysical Club’ meeting in Harvard and was largely developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, two proto-pragmatists who framed the ideas of this philosophy around pragmaticism as a’maxim for clarifying concepts and hypotheses, identifying empty disputes, and for interrogating the value and meaning of research data’ (Morgan 2014b).
The idea behind pragmatism is that researchers can steer clear of metaphysical debates about truth and reality and focus on ‘practical understandings’ of concrete, real-world issues. Epistemologically, pragmatism is compatible with qualitative-dominant interpretivist understandings of socially constructed reality, with the central emphasis on ‘interrogating research data in terms of its practical consequences for the case study organization’ (Patton 2005: 153).
Practicality and relevance are central to the philosophy of pragmatism. As such, a pragmatist approach provides a flexible frame for examining the nature of an organisation’s informal practices and uncovering staff interests and perceived benefits of a project from its outset. This approach, coupled with a strong focus on ‘actionable knowledge’, has led a number of researchers to embrace this methodology in the context of NGOs and other community-based organisations.
Pragmatism has a long history in teaching, with activities for greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, and apologies being particularly popular. Lessons on pragmatics can also be used to discuss the context and background of an utterance as well as its implications. For example, Joseph Siegel’s Forum article “Pragmatic Activities for the Speaking Classroom” outlines one way of teaching pragmatics in an English class through an activity that involves students creating responses to request scenarios.
This lesson can be easily extended to include a range of other language functions, such as assertives, negations, and questions. It can also be used to explore the use of the word ‘I’ and its effects on phrasing.
For many pragmatists, the choice of a particular research question is critical. The goal is to find a problem that will have significant and worthwhile consequences for the organisation and the people who work there. It is for this reason that pragmatism has been embraced by a wide range of disciplines, including social work and organisational research.
Pragmatism’s roots are in American culture and the 19th century science revolution of evolutionary theory, which was of significant interest to its founders. However, by the turn of the 20th century pragmatism was eclipsed by the growing popularity of analytic philosophy and self-consciously rigorous imports from the European Continent, such as Wittgenstein and Moore, and it became a marginal philosophy at best. Nevertheless, the pragmatic approach continues to play a role in the work of some contemporary philosophers. Brandom, for example, focuses on the pragmatic aspects of truth in an attempt to reconstruct an account of reference that is agnostic about the existence of a ‘truth-value’. This is a different type of pragmatics from the classic pragmatism of Peirce and James, which viewed linguistic meaning as the primary pragmatic feature of an utterance.