Pragmatic describes someone or something that focuses on what works and what makes sense in a specific situation. People who are pragmatic are practical, matter-of-fact, rational, sensible, and no-nonsense. They don’t get bogged down with idealistic theories that might not be feasible in reality. They are often said to be “real world” people because they think about what will actually work in the real world, rather than getting stuck in theory and philosophy.
Pragmatism first emerged around 1870, as a growing third alternative to both analytic and continental philosophical traditions worldwide. Its key ideas were originated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who defined and defended pragmatism, and by his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910), who further developed it. The early pragmatists shared a broad outlook, which included fallibilist epistemology and an anti-Cartesian explication of the norms of inquiry. But they split over questions of realism broadly conceived – whether to embrace a scientific monism about truth (as Peirce did), or a more broad-based alethic pluralism (as James and Dewey did).
Eventually, the pragmatic philosophers were joined by a number of sociologists and psychologists, who helped to elucidate the social implications of pragmatism, and explore its relationship with human nature. By the 1940s, though, pragmatism had dipped in popularity, as analytic philosophy blossomed and became dominant in most Anglo-American philosophy departments.
Today, a broad range of philosophers continue to identify with the pragmatist tradition. Some – such as Richard Rorty (1931-2007) – have consciously turned to pragmatism in order to address what they see as mainstream epistemology’s crucial mistake of naively conceiving of language and thought as mirroring the world (pragmatism’s ‘representationalism’). Others – including Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, and Huw Price – have sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity.
Pragmatics – which studies the interaction of meaning and context – is generally seen as a subset of semantics, the study of the literal meanings of words, and syntax (or “syntax”), which examines how the relationships between signs or symbols are structured. Semantics focuses on the objects or ideas to which words refer, while pragmatics studies how speakers and listeners disambiguate and communicate these meanings in particular contexts, in accordance with the Gricean principles and maxims. This distinction between semantics and pragmatics is not, however, always clear-cut: for example, the linguistic scholar Rodney Huddleston has argued that the distinction is porous, and that there are many instances where semantic and pragmatic considerations come together.