Pragmatic is a philosophical viewpoint that puts emphasis on what actually works rather than theoretical ideals. In the realm of hypnosis, pragmatics refers to the ability to make quick and effective decisions that have tangible results. In clinical hypnosis, pragmatics is essential in the context of delivering customized, therapeutic hypnotherapy treatment for each client’s unique needs.
Pragmatism is often seen as a hybrid of other philosophical perspectives, including the epistemology of radical empiricism and the philosophy of science. The latter perspective places limits on the role of theory in scientific investigation, arguing that theories are only valid when they help in inquiry or in obtaining knowledge. This pragmatism is often referred to as “pessimistic epistemology.”
Radical empiricism places more focus on the experience of knowledge than does classical pragmatism. It questions whether science degrades everything that is meaningful into merely physical phenomena. In contrast, pragmatists believe that many issues in the relationship between religion and science are based on conceptual confusions. John Dewey in his 1929 book Experience and Nature and, half a century later, Richard Rorty in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argue that most disputes over the relation between religion and science are caused by misconceptions about what science really is.
Philosophers who influenced pragmatism include Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and George Herbert Mead. Their work in psychology and sociology has a strong connection with pragmatism, as these thinkers believed that people learn by doing, and that the best way to understand the world is to get out and observe it.
Applied fields like public administration, leadership studies, and international relations have also incorporated pragmatist tenets. The philosopher and educator Mary Parker Follett is a feminist pragmatist whose writings emphasize the connection between thought and action.
The term pragmatic is a noun, meaning “practical” or “workable.” It has become popular in the context of computer information technology (IT), where it refers to the process of creating software that uses contextual knowledge to more accurately approximate human language and information processing capabilities. In particular, computational pragmatics, which was developed by Victoria Fromkin and involves the use of natural language to communicate intention to computers in a manner that is as close to natural human communication as possible. A related area is pragmatics in artificial intelligence, which focuses on how to determine the difference between two objects by using context-based information. These pragmatic approaches to computer science are now part of the standard tools used in IT to support human communication, and they are also beginning to appear in other disciplines such as biology, medicine, and linguistics. For example, scientists have developed methods to measure the semantic and syntactic differences of words by analyzing their grammatical properties. These methods have been referred to as the pragmatics of language. Similarly, psychologists are studying how the syntactic structure of sentences affects their psychological and neurological implications. They are using these methods to develop models of how language and brain function in humans.