Pragmatic is a word that describes a mindset that takes a practical, realistic approach. The pragmatic person is someone who considers what actually works in the real world and doesn’t expect a four-year-old to have a unicorn for her birthday. Pragmatism is often contrasted with idealistic, which means based on high principles or ideals.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragma, which means “deed.” A person who practices pragmatics is one who acts on what they know works rather than on abstract ideas or ideals. It’s also the name of a philosophical school of thought that focuses on how a statement is understood by the speaker and what implications it might have for others.
The pragmatics of language are a huge part of everyday communication, especially in conversations with strangers or people we don’t know well. Using the right words and phrases in the proper context helps to disambiguate meaning so that you and the person you’re talking to are on the same page when it comes to what each of you is saying. This process is called pragmatics, and a good understanding of how a sentence is interpreted by others can make your conversations much easier and more enjoyable.
Among the many areas of philosophy where a pragmatist view is helpful are issues surrounding ethics and metaphysics, but pragmatism has most recently found a home in pragmatic semantics, the study of how we use and interpret language. The philosopher Robert Brandom is an important pragmatist, although his philosophical interests are not identical to those of the classical pragmatists, and his work often looks toward a more contemporary and broader range of influences than those of the classic pragmatists themselves.
While Dewey’s pragmatism was influential both within the United States and abroad, the philosophical climate began to change in the early twentieth century with the rise of what has been termed analytic philosophy. As more and more philosophers started to read the likes of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, they found the more general dicta of classical pragmatists to be infuriatingly vague and hazy.
Nevertheless, some of the most important pragmatists—such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James—maintained their positions in philosophy long after they left academia. And although pragmatism was never a unified movement, the philosophies of the classic pragmatists continue to provide a useful alternative both to analytic and Continental traditions worldwide.