Pragmatic is an adjective that describes things that are practical and reasonable. It is also used as a word to describe political positions that are middle of the road and take arguments from both sides into consideration. Pragmatic is often used in business to describe the approach to marketing that focuses on finding out what your customers want and needs before creating a product. It involves creating a plan to meet those needs and then testing it to make sure it works before launching the product. This is similar to agile software development where you build and test the product before releasing it to the market.
A Pragmatist is someone that believes in using evidence to determine what is true or false. A pragmatist does not believe in absolute truths but believes that certain truths are more useful than others. For example, a pragmatist might believe that it is more important to know whether there are invisible gremlins living in electrical outlets than to know the exact number of gremlins that reside in each outlet. This knowledge would be useful to a person who was trying to keep their children safe from gremlins. This type of knowledge is only partially true but it is a useful piece of information to have.
Some philosophers who consider themselves pragmatists have created a creed to define their beliefs. However, there is no neat list of articles or essential tenets that are endorsed by all pragmatists. There are some themes and theses that loom large in the pragmatist tradition, though.
Most pragmatists reject the foundationalist picture of reality that asserts that humans gain epistemic access to reality by observing, feeling, and sensing it directly. Instead, pragmatists such as Sellars, Rorty, Davidson, Putnam, and others claim that observation is always theory-laden; we cannot verify theories or worldviews by comparing them with some raw, uncontaminated sense data. In addition, the nature of experience is a fundamentally problematic concept.
Another central theme of pragmatism is the evaluative and contextual nature of knowledge. A pragmatist believes that knowledge is always incomplete, and that it is important to consider how much effort it will take to develop knowledge that has utility. This is because it is not logically possible to have complete and exhaustive knowledge of the universe.
Finally, a pragmatist will be willing to drop old ideas that lose their value and will be open to new ones that may prove more useful. This is because a pragmatist understands that knowledge is a process and that a good plan violently executed now might be better than a perfect plan executed next week. This is the reason that a pragmatist will never use rigid ideas that are not tested and evaluated regularly. In addition, a pragmatist will never confuse correlation with causation. This is because they are not convinced that correlation necessarily leads to causation and it may be difficult or impossible for a human to have complete knowledge of the world.