Pragmatic: A person who is pragmatic is able to make decisions based on practical, real-world circumstances. This is contrasted with someone who is dogmatic, which means that they are unable to make choices based on anything other than what they believe is right.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that was popularized by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, two American philosophers. It is characterized by an emphasis on practical results rather than abstract theories, and the idea that ideas are tools for functioning.
Although pragmatism has roots in several disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, it is most closely related to semiotics and the philosophy of language. Pragmatics studies how meaning is constructed through the use of context, signs and symbols, and the interaction between people. It is a broad philosophical field that has implications for other fields such as communication studies, linguistics, and social psychology.
The term pragmatist was first used to describe James’s views in 1898, but he scrupulously swore that he had not coined the word himself, and Peirce was quick to clarify that he had developed the ideas first. James’s book Pragmatism (1900) popularized his philosophy, and he and Peirce developed the ideas further in a series of lectures. By the 1940s, pragmatism had lost some of its luster, however, as Americans read more and more of the work of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, and mainstream analytic philosophers started to ignore it.
Contemporary pragmatists are mostly anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists, but there are also some sociologists and mathematicians and computer scientists. One of the most notable contemporary pragmatists is Robert Brandom, though his philosophy is very different from that of the classical pragmatists. He has written extensively on topics such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science.
A key issue in modern pragmatics is the role of values. Some pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty and John Rawls, argue that we need to take into account the values of the people with whom we are communicating in order to ensure that our discourse is meaningful. Others, such as Dewey and Mead, are more concerned with the ways in which ideas change over time and are constructed through interactions with other people.
Other important recent developments in pragmatics include the study of pragmatic theory and computational pragmatics. The former is a branch of semantics that concerns the study of how we interpret and use language, and it includes an analysis of what a sentence or phrase actually means to its speakers. The latter is a subfield of natural language processing, and it studies how computers can better understand human input by considering the meanings of words in their contexts. In addition, it involves analyzing how people express their intentions with the help of contextual clues such as gestures and facial expressions. The goal of computational pragmatics is to enable computers to more accurately emulate natural human language and information processing abilities. This requires an extensive database of knowledge, as well as algorithms that can analyze the data and find the most appropriate interpretation.