Pragmatic is a word used to describe choices, actions or plans that are practical and reasonable. This thinking style is often contrasted with idealism, where ideals and wishes drive decisions. People who are pragmatic have a middle-of-the-road approach to life that takes all arguments into account. Pragmatists also tend to have more real-world experience than idealism.
Philosophers often define pragmatism in terms of its stance on truth, knowledge and reality. For example, pragmatists reject the notion of absolute truth, and they believe that we only have knowledge in as much as it proves useful to us. They also believe that knowledge is constructed and built upon other theories, not just based on direct perception.
Many people use the word pragmatic to describe their own thinking styles, and it can also refer to someone else’s style of navigating life. For example, an idealistic person might be told that they should be more pragmatic about their goals, or that they should try to balance their ambitions with the realities of their situation. Pragmatic thinking also applies to political positions or viewpoints. Some politicians, for instance, are praised as being “pragmatic” in their choice of policies.
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce is considered one of the first self-conscious pragmatists, and William James was another. Both were members of “The Metaphysical Club,” a group of Harvard-educated men who met for informal discussions in early 1870s Boston, and who would go on to influence American philosophy for decades to come.
Peirce was a logician and mathematician, while James was a psychologist with a medical degree. Peirce, James and their followers were skeptical of traditional forms of philosophy that looked to a fixed set of rules for determining meaning, like semantics, syntax and semiotics. Instead, pragmatists looked to the context of an utterance and its effect on a speaker or listener to determine meaning.
A tenet of pragmatism was the pragmatic maxim, which stated that “the whole of a conception of an object is its implications for informed practice.” This theory equated knowledge with the results of a given process of inquiry. Peirce and his followers also rejected “foundationalist” theories of justification, which held that empirical knowledge relies on a set of foundational beliefs.
The pragmatic school of thought also rejected the coherence theory of truth, which holds that a fact should be coherent as a whole. For example, it should not be possible to develop wild theories that contradict other facts, such as the theory that your cat has power over the weather. For the pragmatists, this kind of error was a sign of a weak or incomplete understanding of the facts.
The pragmatic school also emphasized the importance of coping with reality as an essential prerequisite for knowing the truth about things. In this way, a scientific theory’s value must be measured by its ability to solve important problems. For Dewey, a key figure in the pragmatic school of thought, this was known as “the pragmatic criterion.” In his view, a theory should be accepted if it works and has the potential to be reliable over time.