Pragmatic refers to the ability to interpret situations and make decisions based on practical, real-world circumstances. The word is commonly used to describe someone who makes choices that are both reasonable and effective. Pragmatism also applies to a particular philosophy of life that is often used as a philosophical framework for the arts, particularly literature and music. However, there is some debate about the meaning of the word and its use in different contexts. Some individuals are against pragmatics, arguing that it is a dangerous form of relativism and that it leads to an over-reliance on the individual’s personal preferences. Despite this, some believe that pragmatics is necessary for proper interpretation of everyday conversation and that it can be applied to many aspects of daily life.
The paper uses two projects involving qualitative research on NGO processes as case studies to highlight pragmatic methodology and the potential diverse applications of this approach. The first project focuses on the interconnectedness of experience, knowing and acting in the research process within respondent organizations. The second project demonstrates how pragmatism can help researchers surface complex themes and issues in organizational processes that may be hidden by formal documentation or rhetoric. The articles illustrate how pragmatism can assist with the navigation of qualitative applied social research into NGO processes by promoting the use of triangulation and drawing on non-representational approaches to research.
A neo-pragmatic approach to truth offers an alternative to the traditional pragmatic account of truth as justified assertibility. Instead of asserting that a proposition is true because it works, this neo-pragmatic account claims that the principle of verisimilitude holds: that the proposition is true if it is a good idea to say so. This neo-pragmatic version of truth is not the relativism that classical pragmatists (such as Peirce, James and Dewey) were accused of but it does share some features with, and draws on, well-developed non-correspondence theories of truth such as disquotationalism, deflationism and minimalism.
The papers in this special issue suggest that the future of experimental pragmatics will require more attention to the particularities of pragmatic experience. This means closer examination of the people who are studied, the specific tasks that they perform and the actual complex meanings they interpret in these contexts. It will also require new theoretically motivated links between the pragmatic mechanisms that people use on the one hand, and the semantic and cognitive mechanisms that underlie them on the other. This kind of work will enable researchers to study the ways in which pragmatic communication interfaces with the world around us in new, more insightful ways. The contributions to this special issue therefore make an important contribution to the ongoing discussion of pragmatic methodology and its applications. This will be of interest to researchers in the areas of linguistic pragmatics, socio-cultural pragmatics, and applied philosophy as well as to those who use pragmatism as a framework for their research. The papers offer a wide variety of empirical topics, methods and perspectives that are characteristic of the state of the art in pragmatic research.