Pragmatic means practical, businesslike, and efficient. It’s derived from the Greek pragma, meaning “deed; state business.” People who are pragmatic think and act in a businesslike way that takes into account the consequences of their actions. For example, a pragmatist might decide to settle a lawsuit rather than fight it in court because the former is more cost-effective.
A pragmatist might also choose to buy a house instead of renting because the former is more affordable. The pragmatic approach is often the best one when it comes to managing money.
People who are pragmatic are quick to take action and get things done. They are more concerned with getting results than understanding the big picture like idealists are. Although pragmatists are fast to move, they can benefit from taking a step back and looking at a situation from different angles before acting.
Those who study pragmatics are interested in what we can learn about language by studying the context of a communication and how it affects the meaning of a message. Pragmatics is a broad area of inquiry that includes semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, and the philosophy of language. It can even include the study of child language acquisition.
The philosophy of pragmatism was developed by a group of Harvard-educated men known as the Metaphysical Club. They met for informal philosophical discussions in the early 1870s and included the proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two then-fledgling philosophers who became the first self-conscious pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910).
Pragmatism focuses on the nature of human experience and the way in which our experiences influence the ways we see the world. It rejects the idea that truth and knowledge are somehow independent of our beliefs and values, and it asserts that a purely naturalistic approach to life is not enough because it fails to take into account the role of social institutions.
Pragmatists believe that the most important thing is how things actually work, not how they should work. They use their experience to determine the right course of action, and they consider the consequences of their choices when making decisions. This enables them to avoid being swayed by ideas and beliefs that are not rooted in practical experience. In fact, pragmatists are more likely to agree with Oscar Wilde’s maxim that only the deepest people know what is truly beautiful. For this reason, they might find the notion of a universal morality to be unpalatable.