Pragmatic is an approach to knowledge that stresses its usefulness rather than the strict adherence to theory. This attitude is especially pronounced in the field of marketing where it can be used to achieve short-term business results. Pragmatic is also used to describe a person’s attitude towards certain issues or subjects. For instance, someone who is pragmatic may view realists as over-thinkers and optimists as too detached from immediate concerns.
Among the many ideas associated with Pragmatism are the notions that truth is a matter of what works and that one should seek out practical knowledge. These ideas were formulated in the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century and have influenced a wide range of non-philosophical disciplines, such as law, education, politics, sociology, and psychology. The term is most often used in the context of philosophy but has also been applied to science, technology, and even sports.
For a philosopher to be considered Pragmatic, he must hold the view that truth is relative and that it depends on what one can do with knowledge. He must also be willing to accept a hypothesis as mostly true until proven otherwise. This attitude is a marked contrast to skepticism, which holds that nothing is known for sure.
In addition to this, a pragmatist must be willing to acknowledge that the world is full of grey areas. He must be able to weigh the costs and benefits of increasing his level of certainty about various things. This is especially important for a man in a dangerous profession, such as a boxer. In such cases, he must be willing to use his limited resources wisely in order to have the best chance of success.
A pragmatist will also be interested in partial truths, which are sometimes more useful than complete or absolute truths. For example, a boxer who is aware that his opponent has some weakness in his left side must weigh the cost of improving his defensive capabilities against the benefits of having such knowledge on the day of the fight. Similarly, a furniture shopper who is reasonably certain that a piece of wood is of reasonable quality must weigh the value of having such knowledge against the cost of investing more time and resources in researching the subject.
Another idea favored by pragmatists is the notion that one’s understanding of a concept changes with each application. This is a fundamental element of speech act theory, which is a branch of Pragmatics that focuses on the context-dependent aspects of linguistic interpretation and analysis. For example, the’referential content’ of an utterance will be different in each context in which it is spoken based on factors such as ambiguity or indexicality. Critical pragmatists, such as Perry and Korta, have called this the distinction between’reflexive’ and’referential’ meaning.