Pragmatic is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving and action. It argues that most philosophical topics, such as the nature of language, concepts, meaning, and knowledge are best viewed as practical problems that need to be solved by means of inquiry whose ultimate goal is to enable people to live better lives.
The pragmatist approach has become widely accepted in applied fields, including public administration, leadership studies, international relations, and research methodology. It is particularly well suited to social science, where it emphasizes the connection between thought and action. The pragmatist framework also supports the use of qualitative methods, including ethnography and discourse analysis.
However, the pragmatist approach does not claim to be the ultimate political perspective or the true social theory. In fact, it advocates an ethics-based pursuit of democracy, equality and justice for everyone (Koenig et al. 2019). In practice, pragmatist research is often mixed with quantitative and qualitative methodologies. It also includes a commitment to democratic and participatory research, whereby researchers and participants are involved at each step of the process.
A person’s pragmatic knowledge is what allows them to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines or navigate ambiguity in context. It is what allows them to negotiate turn taking norms in conversation, for example. It is what enables them to understand and be understood by their peers and contemporaries.
This neo-pragmatic approach of truth is less absolutist than previous pragmatic accounts and is more closely related to Peirce and Dewey’s pragmatic ideals of truth and the emergence of knowledge. It is also able to draw on, and draw parallels with, a wide range of non-correspondence theories of truth, such as disquotationalism, deflationism and minimalism. These theories, which are more socially and esthetically decontextualized than those that pragmatic theories typically discuss, have not been available to earlier pragmatists.
It is not clear, however, whether this neo-pragmatic approach provides a sufficient basis for the premise of a truth-apt assertion. While it does provide a stronger justification for pragmatism’s prioritization of the speech-act and justification projects, it still leaves open the question about how this neo-pragmatic ideal of truth is to be reconciled with the existence of, for example, normative facts, which seem ontologically distinct from garden-variety physical facts.
The pragmatic philosophy is the belief that the way one behaves, speaks and thinks has an impact on how others perceive them. Its focus on everyday communication and its emphasis on the value of the individual is a core aspect of humanism and has contributed to the development of many philosophies, including existentialism, utilitarianism and anarchism.
In the study of language, pragmatics is a subfield that investigates the ways in which we communicate and interpret each other’s utterances. It is a cross-disciplinary field that draws on the other 6 linguistic frameworks, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and syntax, as well as the social sciences. Pragmatics is one of the foundational areas in the study of language, and its research has a direct influence on how we communicate in the real world.