Pragmatic is a philosophy that was first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James and has since become a third alternative to both analytic and continental philosophical traditions. It is a philosophy that rejects skepticism, embraces fallibilism and rejects sharp dichotomies such as fact and value, mind and body, analytic and synthetic etc. It is also a philosophy that places the primacy of experience over ideas and theories.
The pragmatist approach to truth was originally developed as part of the scientific revolution that was underway around evolutionary theory (see Menand 1998). However, it has also proved extremely influential in many other areas of philosophy and even beyond the sciences.
In the field of human resource management for example, Morgan argues that pragmatism offers a powerful way to address the problems of both qualitative and quantitative research in HRM by taking advantage of the strengths of each approach and combining them in a pragmatic fashion. The pragmatist approach provides an ideal platform for developing knowledge that is anchored in respondent experience and, therefore, highly relevant to practice. The pragmatist approach to research is therefore an important contribution to the debate on alternatives to the dominant paradigms of conventional qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
Similarly, the use of a pragmatist approach in evaluation is an important contribution to the debate on what is needed for evaluation to be a valid and useful form of inquiry. In this respect, a pragmatist approach is particularly relevant for evaluations of complex and messy organizational behaviours that are best understood through the lens of multiple theories and approaches to organisational complexity.
There are a number of issues with pragmatism that have been highlighted in recent literature. The most obvious issue is the collapse of pragmatism when it is applied to ethical and moral issues. This is because, if you are a pragmatist, you have to be willing to accept that the only thing that matters in evaluation is what works. For example, if you tell a child that invisible gremlins live in electrical outlets and will bite them if touched, this is something that ‘works’. However, it is not necessarily true.
The papers in this special issue demonstrate that there is a need to develop more precise, theoretically motivated connections between pragmatic mechanisms on the one hand and semantic and cognitive mechanisms that underlie them on the other. This should help us move beyond the rather simplistic view that pragmatism is just an approach to empirical questions and instead recognise that it has potential to offer rich and diverse contributions to many different areas of philosophical enquiry. To do this, however, we need to develop better ways of describing the specific pragmatic processes involved in communication. This is a key challenge for the future of this journal.