Pragmatic is the term used to describe someone who is more concerned with matters of fact than with wishful or idealistic ones. Someone who is pragmatic is able to adapt and accept that not all ideas or beliefs will be proven true, and that he or she may need to change course in order to meet the demands of a changing world.
In the world of philosophy, pragmatism was a movement that emerged in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Although it has had significant non-philosophical influences, this article focuses on its role as a philosophical movement that has influenced many philosophers, not only in the field of philosophy, but also in areas such as law, education, politics, sociology and psychology. The pragmatists, such as Dewey, James and Mead, are credited with introducing a more pragmatic approach to philosophy that is centered on the concept that ideologies or propositions are true if they work satisfactorily, and that unpractical ideas should be rejected.
The philosophical movement of pragmatism is often confused with realism, which is the theory that reality is objective and independent of human perceptions and interpretations. The realism of the pragmatists, however, differed significantly from that of the classical realism that was popular in Europe. Specifically, realism did not consider that the nature of things could be known, only that things existed.
The pragmatists’ view of truth and knowledge was heavily influenced by the 18th-century British empiricism in the work of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain and George Berkeley. Their emphasis on the experiential nature of belief, as well as their analysis of sensations as signs (and thus predictive) of future experience led to Peirce’s coining of the phrase, “pragmatism.”
A defining feature of a pragmatist is an open mind regarding ideas and beliefs. Pragmatists are willing to drop old theories that do not serve them well and embrace new ones that have potential value. This flexibility is a key aspect of pragmatism that distinguishes it from the more rigid, inflexible philosophies that were popular in earlier centuries.
One of the best-known applications of pragmatism is in the discipline of natural language processing, which involves using contextual information to better approximate the ability of computers to understand human language and other forms of communication. Computer scientists use computational pragmatics to solve such problems as reference resolution, which is the process of determining when a computer is referring to the same entity as another object, and inference resolution, which involves drawing conclusions about the intent of a speaker.
Parents and speech language pathologists often ask, “What test will show that my child has difficulty with pragmatics?” The answer is, unfortunately, that there is no single effective standardized pragmatics assessment instrument. However, a number of informal assessments can be useful in identifying pragmatic difficulties. The process of evaluating pragmatics involves note-taking during a social interaction, interviewing the individual to identify specific difficulties and providing opportunities for the person to demonstrate what he or she is able to do in natural pragmatic situations.