Pragmatic is the study of the contextual meaning of utterances and how this influences interactions between speakers. It focuses on implied meanings rather than literal meaning and takes into account cultural, social and situational factors. Pragmatics considers what the speaker and listener are trying to accomplish when they use language, what their response might be, and how this relates to the message itself.
The word pragmatic first came into use in print in 1898, when William James pressed it to service as the name of a philosophical outlook during a speech at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously swore that he had only a hazy notion of where the term originated—in any case, C. S. Peirce had a name for his own doctrines, which he called “pragmaticism,” and the outlook itself was widely known by then as pragmatism.
Classical pragmatists ranged widely in their philosophizing, but they all shared a commitment to methodological naturalism and a rejection of metaphysical assumptions that might stand in the way of the search for useful knowledge. John Dewey (1859-1952) was a major figure in this group, and his broad and influential work helped give pragmatism traction in American intellectual life for over a decade.
But pragmatism lost momentum with the rise of analytic philosophy. Quine’s (1908-2000) landmark article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” challenged positivist orthodoxy and drew upon some pragmatist thought, but analytic philosophers largely ignored the pragmatist legacy for a generation.
In the 1980s, however, a movement emerged to reclaim pragmatism as a valuable philosophy, and scholars began to draw on it in such diverse areas as sociology, philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and ethics. The pragmatist perspectives offered by such thinkers as George Herbert Mead, W. E. B Du Bois, and Nelson Goodman helped spark important developments in cultural studies, philosophy of race and gender, and social science.
Today’s neopragmatists, such as Richard Rorty and William Brandom, share with classical pragmatists a commitment to naturalism and a rejection of metaphysical baggage. They also, like James and Dewey, deny that truth is a substantial metaphysical property possessed by some propositions but not others and that references to such properties must be negotiated in practice (Brandom, 2008).
While many people immediately recognize that pragmatism implodes when applied to empirical issues, such as whether a particular claim generates acceptable results, others find it less easy to see the problem with its application to moral questions. It is here that pragmatism has perhaps been most dangerous, as a pragmatic approach to morality can be used as a cover for moral relativism. For example, the statement that Africans are not really people can “work” in terms of pleasing European slave owners—but it can easily lead to the exploitation of Africans themselves.