Pragmatic Philosophy

Pragmatic is a philosophy that stresses the connection between thought and action. Applied fields like public administration, leadership studies, political science, international relations, conflict resolution, and research methodology have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism. Pragmatism is often described as a reformation of classic empiricism or positivism, which emphasizes that a proposition is meaningful only insofar as it serves a practical purpose.

In pragmatic terms, a person is said to be pragmatic when they are willing to compromise on their ideals in order to achieve a more realistic outcome. Pragmatic people have extra keys made so that they can leave them with family or friends, for example. They also take an umbrella when they go out in rainy Seattle because they know that the weather can be unpredictable.

The pragmatists emphasized the importance of context and of establishing rules for interpreting meaning in the face of uncertainty and conflict. They developed a theory of knowledge that was based on the recognition that what we think we know is only a limited part of reality. In addition, they held that our knowledge is limited by the resources available to us at any given time and place and that it is possible to change our beliefs in light of new information.

Pragmatism was first developed by Charles Peirce and William James in discussions at a metaphysical club that met at Harvard beginning around 1870 (for more on this group, see Menand 1998). The key ideas were published in various books starting in the 1890s and eventually achieved widespread popularity through a series of lectures by James in 1907. He began by identifying ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’ (1907: 9ff) as a fundamental clash between two ways of thinking that he promised pragmatism would overcome. He called the one ‘tough-minded, empiricist and committed to experience and the facts’ and the other ‘tender-minded, a priori and appealing to the logic of ratiocination’.

A defining feature of pragmatism is the idea that there are no objectively valid truths, only practical or useful truths. This is a significant departure from the more traditional philosophy of truth, which was grounded in a belief in objective truths as such. Some philosophers who have endorsed pragmatism have also incorporated elements of other philosophical traditions, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism. A recent and promising attempt to develop a neopragmatist version of value theory that draws on these different sources has been the work of Jurgen Habermas (Heney 2016). Other contemporary neopragmatists have concentrated on philosophy of language and metaphilosophy. This has resulted in a neglect of some of classical pragmatism’s core concepts, such as the concept of the pragmatic maxim. This problem is being addressed by some scholars of neopragmatism who are developing normative pragmatics in an attempt to reintegrate classical pragmatism with the broader philosophical landscape.