Pragmatic is a word that describes a person who focuses more on the facts of a situation rather than on what could or should be. This is in contrast to a dogmatic person who adheres strictly to certain morals or thinking.
During the nineteenth century, a philosophical movement known as Pragmatism emerged in the United States and offered an alternative to analytic and continental traditions. Its first generation included Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and Josiah Royce. Responsive to evolutionary theory and the scientific revolution then taking place, pragmatist philosophers emphasized the plasticity of reality and the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to and controlling it. They were also critical of metaphysical theories that devalue action and relegate it to a merely ethical or moral status.
A defining feature of pragmatism is that there is no ‘pragmatist creed’, no neat list of articles or essential tenets that are endorsed by all pragmatists and only by pragmatists. However, some ideas have loomed large in pragmatism and these are discussed below.
For pragmatists, the central concept is that there are no facts or objects in the world that are independent of human perception and action. Instead, the world is a process of change that is continuously modified by human action and our ideas about it. This perspective allows us to understand the world in terms of relations between its parts, and to make sense of events as being the result of a dynamic interaction of human actions and the environment they are in.
To this end, pragmatists have emphasized the role of experience in shaping beliefs and in determining their validity. They have characterized experiences as having a ‘causal structure’ and argued that understanding these structures helps to explain how our ideas are formed, how we acquire knowledge and how our behaviour is directed.
In the last fifty years or so, pragmatism has experienced something of a revival. Richard Rorty turned consciously to pragmatism in an attempt to correct what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s crucial error of naively conceiving of thought and language as mirroring the world (Rorty 1982). More recently, philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom and Huw Price have sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity.
As well as providing an overview of these important themes, this article aims to provide a brief guide to pragmatism as a whole. A bibliography is provided to help students further explore the themes and authors discussed. The bibliography contains collections of the writings of Peirce and Royce, as well as works that are cited in this article. For more information on pragmatism, students are recommended to read the following books.