Pragmatic is a term used to describe the way in which someone deals with things sensibly and realistically, making decisions based on practical considerations rather than an ideological vision of how things should be. Someone who is pragmatic is concerned with outcomes and consequences, and prefers to move forward with incremental improvement over risk-taking and pursuing an untested vision of the future.
A pragmatic person will weigh up all the available evidence before making a decision, and take into account the opinions of others in order to make a well-informed choice. They will also be willing to learn from any mistakes they might make along the way. Pragmatic people are also able to recognise that there are some things beyond their control, and they will find ways to overcome these obstacles to achieve their goals.
Pragmatism was founded by philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, who both promoted the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved in practical ways, and rejected the traditional dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body and analytic/synthetic. The ideas behind pragmatism gained prominence in discussions at the Metaphysical Club at Harvard in the 1870s (for a popular history of this group see Menand 1998).
A central issue in pragmatism is the role that beliefs play in representing reality. James argued that, as intelligent organisms we live in a world of competing claims about truth and falsehood, and that the only thing that matters is how useful our beliefs are in our struggle to survive and thrive. The belief that something is true, according to pragmatism, is only valid as long as it is a ‘copy of the reality that is actual and immediate’. This view was controversial at the time, as it challenged traditional views of reality such as that of a objectively ‘independent’ universe.
The discipline of pragmatism has various branches, including philosophy, semantics and ethics. Pragmatics is a sub-discipline of philosophy that studies the nature of meaning, the context of communication and the way in which we use language. It is often compared with the more general field of semantics, but differs in that it pays particular attention to speakers’ communicative intentions, the context in which they are uttered, and the strategies hearers employ to discern these intentions from the expressions used and their meanings.
Another branch of pragmatism is computational pragmatics, which investigates how to best help computers understand the meaning of human speech. For example, this involves resolving ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of names, indexicals and demonstratives, and issues involving presupposition.