Pragmatic is a philosophical movement that emphasizes the practical nature of human thought and action. This philosophy rejects metaphysical or ontological claims that are untestable and asserts that the best way to understand reality is through empirical observation and experience. Its founding philosophers were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a logician, mathematician, and scientist; and William James (1842-1910), an American psychologist who was also an influential moralist and social theorist.
As a philosophical movement, Pragmatism presents a third alternative to the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. It emerged in the United States around 1870 and was influenced by the evolutionary revolution then taking place, which first generation pragmatists viewed as an important source of insight.
The pragmatic movement stresses the importance of connection between thought and action, and its tenets are widely applied across multiple disciplines. The pragmatist philosophy has been used in fields like public administration, management, leadership studies, political science, public policy, and international relations, among others. In the study of language, Pragmatics examines the pragmatic meaning of an utterance and how it is negotiated between two or more speakers. It also looks at how the meaning of an utterance is constructed.
Pragmatists do not view knowledge as an objective, enduring reality (Rorty 1980). Instead, they believe that all knowledge is socially created through our experiences, and therefore, it is always a partial and flawed representation of a real-world event. This is known as the pragmatist epistemology.
Another major aspect of pragmatism is its emphasis on the role of context and environment in human language use. For this reason, pragmatic scholars usually look at how people are able to interpret a given utterance in different situations. This is why many pragmatic researchers use statistical methods to analyze data, as it allows for a more accurate understanding of how certain behaviors occur in specific circumstances.
In experimental pragmatics, it is also important to take into account the particular people involved in an experiment and their specific task demands. This is because within-individual differences in pragmatic performance can be quite substantial. For example, young children might have greater difficulty interpreting complex social cues than adults. This is why it is essential that goals be set at a level appropriate for the individual’s developmental stage.
In addition, it is crucial that the goals of an experiment be realistic and feasible. This is especially important in the context of the current “replication crisis” in scientific research, as failures to replicate results have become increasingly common and have raised doubts about the validity of previously obtained experimental results. As a result, it is vital that pragmatics scholars incorporate tasks and participants into their theories as early in the research process as possible to minimize this issue.