Pragmatic is a philosophical concept that, in broad terms, understands knowledge of the world as inseparable from agency within it. The term pragmatic can also refer to a specific pragmatist school of thought that emphasizes practical consequences in the determination of meaning, truth or value. Pragmatic is often contrasted with idealistic, meaning based on high principles or lofty ideals.
Pragmatism has attracted a remarkably diverse and sometimes contrary range of interpretations. Some pragmatists have promoted scientific experimentation to verify all philosophical concepts, others have held that a concept is true only if it can be demonstrated to be useful (and therefore not worth much), that human experience consists of transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’, and that reality itself is a kind of messy entanglement of interacting events that cannot be reduced to any single systemic theory or model.
Many philosophers who have contributed to pragmatic theory, most notably Grice and James, have developed their ideas in the context of the so-called ‘Metaphysical Club’ at Harvard that began to meet in the 1870s. It was during this time that pragmatism grew into an established philosophical movement, reaching a wide audience through books and lectures.
The defining features of pragmatism are its emphasis on what can and will be done, and its preference for results over esthetic ideals. In its most general form, a pragmatist view of reality seeks to clarify the complexities of our experiences by examining what is done rather than how it ought to be. For example, it may seem a pragmatic decision to kill your creditor to avoid paying your debt when you know that doing so will not cause any long-term damage to your life or the lives of others.
Those who take a pragmatic approach to life often have a strong focus on what will happen and how it will impact their future plans. They are likely to have more interests in their immediate environment and are less concerned with abstract principles or morals. They are often characterized as being practical and realistic in their outlook.
Contemporary philosophical pragmatic theories are divided into two main groups, depending on their view of how far or close the study of pragmatics should be to semantics and grammar. The former, known as ‘classical pragmatics’ after the works of Grice and James, see pragmatics as a philosophical project. The latter, known as’relevance theorists’, are primarily responsible for the way in which contemporary pragmatics is seen as an empirical psychological study of utterance interpretation and the near side of pragmatics. Carston (2005) suggests that this split is a consequence of a clash between pragmatics as a philosophical project and its status as a pragmatics of language, with different disciplines having their own views of what pragmatics should include. A third group, combining elements of both, is known as ‘cognitive pragmatics’.