Pragmatic is the study of how language is used, how we construct meaning and communication between people, and what implied or unstated meaning an utterance might have. It is a broad field of inquiry that intersects with other disciplines, such as linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and theology.
Pragmatist philosophers generally believe that knowledge and truth are derived from the ways human beings use words to communicate with one another and describe their worlds. They also believe that the scientific method is the best way to evaluate claims about the nature of reality.
The Classical Pragmatists (James, Dewey, Mead and others) emphasized the practical applications of their ideas in fields such as education, psychology, social work, public administration and business management. Feminist scholars have interpreted their work as consistent with feminist tenets, and the concepts of Dewey and Addams have been applied to issues such as women’s rights and organizational operation.
Contemporary Pragmatists have applied the principles of pragmatics to a wide range of philosophical topics, such as metaphilosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics and political theory. The philosophy of science is an especially fruitful area for pragmatism, as it has led to such diverse developments as the emergence of analytic philosophy and neo-Pragmatism (Rorty).
Many pragmatists support a form of epistemological relativism, arguing that beliefs acquire true or false status in terms of their usefulness in inquiry and action. Others, however, argue that any claim to truth should be subjected to a rigorous test based on Peirce’s principle of inquiry and verification (e.g. Putnam).
A substantial number of pragmatists are committed to the idea of a universal language which could provide the foundation for global peace and democracy. The idea of a universal language is an integral part of the neo-pragmatist philosophy of language, which was developed by John L. Austin.
Pragmatism has been embraced in applied fields such as public administration, law, business administration and leadership studies, as well as in the areas of conflict resolution and research methodology. The pragmatist emphasis on the connection between thought and action is particularly relevant to such fields, where it is often employed as a means of developing effective policies and assessing the success of those policies. In addition, pragmatist insights have been integrated into many disciplinary and theoretical approaches to language, such as semantics, phonology and lexicology. The concept of pragmatics has even been adopted by the field of computer science as a sub-discipline of natural language processing, where it is used to help computers understand the nuances of human interaction and interpretation. Victoria Fromkin has formulated the discipline of computational pragmatics, which seeks to apply the principles of classical pragmatism to the field of artificial intelligence. A major component of this work involves reference resolution, the process by which computers decide whether an incoming piece of information refers to a known object or not. This is an important challenge that has yet to be fully solved. A recent attempt to construct a pragmatist philosophy of science has been made by Richard Heney, who argues that a pragmatist approach to science will allow for the development of more robust scientific methods.