Pragmatic is the name given to a philosophical tradition that broadly understands knowledge of the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich, if often conflicting range of interpretations. These include the claim that a philosophical concept is ‘true’ if and only if it makes a difference (i.e. it is useful), the view that a philosophical theory should be evaluated by its contribution to social progress, the view that truth is a function of practical activity and the understanding that language embodies a deep bed of human practices that cannot be made fully ‘explicit’.
In its initial period of development pragmatism was influenced by the scientific revolution then taking place around evolutionary theory, of which the first generation of pragmatists were keen observers and sometime participants (Henry 1915; James 1907). It also responded to a growing concern with questions about the nature of truth and meaning. James wrote extensively on the subject, developing a view of truth that was both pragmatic and naturalistic and he and his colleague Josiah Royce criticised prevailing individualist ontologies.
The pragmatist movement extended well beyond the United States. It was a significant influence in France and, especially, in Italy in the early twentieth century (Misak 2000). It also attracted the attention of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge, who developed Peirce’s ideas about inquiry and statistical reasoning, and even Wittgenstein’s later thought acquired something of a pragmatist flavour through his conversations with Ramsey (Kaag 2011).
A key idea of pragmatism is that a truth claim only becomes a truth claim when it becomes practical. This is a crucial distinction from mere ‘objective’ truth, as argued by the logical positivists, and it provides one of the distinctive features of pragmatism.
Another feature of pragmatism is the rejection of dichotomies like fact/value, mind/body and analytic/synthetic, and the acceptance of fallibilism and epistemological pluralism. It is this idea that has generated some of the most challenging and fascinating debates in contemporary philosophy.
More recently, pragmatism has attracted the interest of a wide range of philosophers and other intellectuals. The number of journals with ‘pragmatics’ in the title has grown rapidly and there is an international conference series organised by the American Philosophical Association. The term has also been adopted by a number of sociological and other disciplines, including linguistics. The emergence of this wider movement is the latest stage in a long-term debate about what it means for a discipline to be pragmatic. It is an attempt to find a way of doing philosophy that is both rigorous and wide-ranging in its scope. It is an attempt to give philosophy a new relevance and purpose in the context of contemporary life. The challenge that this poses is enormous, but it is a worthwhile one.