Pragmatic is a word that often gets used in conversations about people who are practical and realists. A pragmatic person is able to see the reality of a situation and deal with it in a way that is effective and reasonable. They are willing to compromise to achieve a goal, and know that they may not get everything they want.
William James used the term “pragmatism” in a 1898 essay to describe his philosophical outlook. He scrupulously swore that he was not inventing the word, having borrowed it from his colleague C. S. Peirce. Regardless, the name stuck, and pragmatism has since become a major philosophical movement.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that stresses the importance of action in our experience and our understanding of the world. It is not a system of ideas with a neat set of tenets that are endorsed by all pragmatists, but rather a tradition of approaches and themes that have been popularized by a number of influential philosophers including Dewey, Mead, and James.
A key theme is that it is impossible to determine the truth of a statement without trying it out. James argues that if something works, it is true; if it doesn’t, it is false. This approach to the epistemological question is known as “the pragmatic ground of knowledge.”
Another major theme is that all reality is experienced through our concepts and descriptions of it. This view of reality is known as “the pragmatic ground of experience.” Rorty, Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, and Goodman are notable philosophers who have emphasized this aspect of pragmatism.
Logic and language are also a central focus of pragmatism. For example, James and Peirce both developed methods of formal logic. Some pragmatists, such as Stephen Toulmin, have been critical of the pretensions of formal logic, and others—including James, Mead, and Dewey—have incorporated some aspects of it into their own approaches to the problem of truth and knowledge.
A contemporary application of pragmatism is computational pragmatics, which is the study of how to help computers understand and process information in a natural and meaningful way. The field has important applications in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and other areas. The concept is important to software engineers, who must make sure that their programs work in a variety of contexts. To do this, they must consider the effects of different pragmatic rules on the correct interpretation of a computer program. Using computational pragmatics, it is possible to create systems that better mimic the human ability to navigate ambiguity. This is essential to ensuring that computers can accurately and effectively process the massive amounts of data they encounter on a daily basis. Ideally, these systems will allow humans to communicate with them in a way that is both natural and efficient. In other words, a computer should be a “pragmatic machine.” This is the key to building intelligent machines.