Pragmatic is a term used to describe someone who can remain calm and make practical calls in the face of a crisis. They don’t get caught up in big-picture ideals or emotions but focus on solving the problem one step at a time.
The pragmatists are also known for their ability to make sense of new information. Their perspective allows them to see a situation objectively, rather than emotionally, which is why they are often seen as the rational choice for business executives and politicians.
Throughout the world, pragmatism presents an increasingly popular third alternative to both continental and analytic traditions of philosophy. Its first generation consists of Charles Sanders Peirce, who defined and defended the view, and his close associates William James and John Dewey, who developed it adroitly into an integrated whole. Their successors, including Josiah Royce and the philosopher Robert M. Pirsig, were more formally allied with absolute idealism but had a pragmatic bent (see below).
As the pragmatist movement continues to grow in influence, many liberatory philosophical projects now look to it as their spiritual home—for example, in areas such as feminism, ecology, Native American philosophy and Latin American philosophy. These projects differ from those of the classical pragmatists, but they all owe a debt to the philosophical insights of the pragmatists.
Another modern development in the pragmatic tradition has been the rise of the field of pragmatics, which studies the ways that people use language to convey meaning and make sense of their experiences. Pragmatics is a broad area of inquiry that includes the study of the underlying semantics of words and sentences, the rules that govern word order in phrases and clauses, how speakers interpret what others say, and the social functions of language.
In the world of business, pragmatics has been applied to such diverse topics as leadership, negotiation, and conflict resolution. It is now a well-established research area within the field of management science, and it offers a powerful perspective on organizational behavior and decision making.
Although the term pragmatic has been in continuous use since the late 19th century, it has not always received wide acceptance. In part, this was because it was a challenge for analytic philosophers to square it with their own views about truth and meaning. The analytic philosophers were not always sympathetic, and as a result, pragmatism became the odd philosophical outlier.
Today, the word is widely accepted and has found its way into a number of common idioms, including “to be pragmatic,” meaning to consider what works in real-world situations, not just what sounds good on paper. It is also now in the OED as a noun, referring to the ability to stay focused on what can and will work in a given situation. Pragmatic is also sometimes used as an adjective, describing things that are practical and useful in the real world. The sturdy furniture in the student lounge is pragmatic, for example. But some people try to solve every problem with an expensive, high-tech solution that has already been shown to be ineffective. This is not pragmatic, or reasonable.