Pragmatic refers to the approach of a person or organization to decisions, actions, and issues that arise in daily life. It is a philosophy of action in which the individual’s concepts, hypotheses, and theories are molded by consideration of their efficacy and utility to serve the needs and purposes of humanity. The molding of language and theorizing are also pragmatic in nature, as the concepts and ideas are based on the perception of how they will be used by others in the real world.
The word pragmatic is derived from two Latin words, pragma and praxis, which both mean “practical.” In modern times, the phrase pragmatic has come to mean something that is practical and reasonable. It is a positive term that compliments choices or actions that are thought to be sensible in their own right. It is often used when describing political positions or strategies, particularly in the context of democracy. In the United States, the phrase is sometimes used to describe a middle of the road position that takes arguments from all sides into account.
In the linguistic field, pragmatics is a subfield of the study of semantics, which deals with the meaning and interpretation of spoken and written language. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. In philosophy, pragmatism is the name of a broad philosophical tradition and its philosophical implications are numerous.
For example, the pragmatist philosophy of Dewey and Mead led to developments in organizational theory and ethics, and has been influenced by such women as Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett. Similarly, Habermas’s discourse ethics – which focuses on the ways in which people communicate their ideas in order to achieve certain goals and aims – is informed by pragmatism. And the pragmatist notion of the community of inquiry has been important for the fields of social science and law, as well as philosophy.
Despite its decline in popularity after the 1930s, pragmatism has experienced something of a revival. This has been partly fueled by Richard Rorty, who turned to the pragmatist tradition in an effort to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s critical mistake of naively conceiving of language and thought as simply mirroring reality. Rorty’s bold and iconoclastic attacks on this’representationalism’ birthed what is now called neopragmatism, an approach to the epistemology of knowledge.
More recently, philosopher Robert Brandom has begun to make contributions to the pragmatist tradition by examining how pragmatism can be applied to the philosophy of language. His views owe less to classical pragmatists, such as Dewey and Mead, than they do to philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine, his teacher Richard Rorty, and historical readings in thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. Moreover, his pragmatic views have been strongly influenced by the analytic school of philosophy. His work is now being read and cited internationally. It is hoped that this article will inspire further pragmatist research and dialogue.