Pragmatic is a philosophical tradition that – broadly – understands knowing the world to be inseparable from agency within it. It has attracted a remarkably rich and sometimes contradictory range of interpretations from philosophers and linguists, especially the early pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1920).
While classical pragmatism is not primarily concerned with truth, it provides some guidance on how to distinguish between different kinds of meaningfulness: namely, conventional or literal meaning, figurative or non-literal meaning, and pragmatic meaning. The linguistic discipline of pragmatics developed from the pragmatist philosophy, and is concerned with how to disambiguate meaning in context.
Pragmatic knowledge is used to do things like politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation and navigate ambiguity in context. It’s also what allows us to do everyday evaluation.
In the field of experimental pragmatics, researchers present participants with a set of stimuli, representing a variety of independent variables. They then observe their responses and calculate the averages of people’s behavioral performances in each experiment condition. This kind of analysis is meant to capture something about the central tendencies in how people react to different experimental conditions. Looking at means is widely viewed as the most appropriate descriptive statistic by which to achieve this goal.
Nevertheless, some pragmatists argue that the emphases on practical, real-world applications of pragmatism can delink it from its important philosophical roots by avoiding important distinctions at an epistemological level (Hesse-Biber 2015). Others point out that the practical, real-world emphasis can lead researchers to take a ‘soft’ approach to their research methods and not address issues such as the differences between quantitative and qualitative research, which can have significant impact on the results of an investigation.
Classical pragmatism is often combined with a commitment to empirical investigation and to the judicious use of qualitative data collection techniques. This can enable a more ‘use-focused’ approach to evaluation and may be particularly relevant for NGOs as their organizational processes are often not well documented, or even existent in some cases, and rely heavily on the knowledge and interpretations of implementing staff. This enables pragmatists to surface the complexity of these processes from what can be observed and documented, allowing them to bring this understanding to the evaluation process. For more information on becoming a pragmatic researcher, see: Onwuegbuzie and Leech (2015).