Pragmatic is a word that is often used to describe someone who makes decisions based on what will work in reality. It is a positive term and is sometimes contrasted with idealistic, which describes people who believe in sticking to their principles no matter what. Many people have a balance of pragmatism and idealism in their lives.
Pragmatism is also an approach to philosophy that puts an emphasis on the way we use language and the context of our communication. It is a philosophical movement that was first popularized by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, but it has been supported by a broad range of contemporary philosophers and thinkers.
A central idea of pragmatism is that we can never know what is true or false beyond the information available to us, but we must evaluate what is true and what is not by determining how useful it is in helping us make practical choices and understand our world. In the early 1900s, pragmatism had its peak of popularity in America, when Dewey was widely viewed as a major figure in American intellectual life and the original pragmatist triumvirate of Peirce, James and Mead was well-established. By the 1940s, however, pragmatism had lost its momentum.
One of the reasons was that, while Dewey had many disciples and imitators, he didn’t have a solid successor. Moreover, the rise of analytic philosophy as a specialized academic discipline undermined pragmatism’s claim that it offered a useful and pragmatic alternative to traditional philosophy by relegating it to the sidelines.
In the late twentieth century, new forms of pragmatism emerged that sought to address these weaknesses. For example, the theory of generative pragmatics (also known as ‘cognitive semantics’) was developed to provide a unified account of meaning and interpretation that incorporates both linguistic and cognitive elements. Another important development was the concept of’referential versus utterance-bound content’, introduced by Korta and Perry, that places a stronger emphasis on the ways that speakers manage the flow of reference in conversation. This includes the ways in which listeners track syntactic clues about the referents of a statement. Critical pragmatics, meanwhile, offers a more minimal approach to the field of pragmatics that emphasizes’reflexive’ and ‘incremental’ meaning rather than conventional semantic values. The’reflexive’ or ‘utterance-bound’ content is the set of truth conditions that apply to an utterance, while the’referential’ or ‘locutionary’ content is the proposition expressed in the utterance.