Pragmatic is a word that gets used a lot in the context of people who are able to stay calm and make clear decisions in a crisis. These people are often described as pragmatic because they don’t get caught up in big-picture ideals or emotional reactions and instead focus on the reality of a situation.
There’s also a downside to being too pragmatic, as it can sometimes lead to avoiding conflict, taking only one side of the argument, and making decisions that aren’t fully informed. This is not a good thing, especially in a team setting where everyone needs to work together for success.
People who are pragmatic also tend to think about the long-term effects of their actions, rather than only focusing on short-term gains. These individuals don’t get hung up on details or overthink things, but see the bigger picture and take steps to ensure they’re on track to reach their goals. They’re able to balance ideals with practicality, and they know how to prioritize tasks in order of their impact.
Traditionally, pragmatism is a philosophical framework that was applied to human behavior and organization studies. It was a counter-point to more positivist and idealistic approaches that saw human experience as a linear process of knowing and acting. Dewey argued that understanding how humans interpret their experiences could help uncover social realities in more clear and insightful ways than philosophical approaches that assumed knowledge and action existed separately.
Today, pragmatism is a popular methodology in social research. The principles of pragmatism can be applied to research at every step, from design to analysis and publication. This article highlights three key principles and demonstrates how they can be incorporated into each step of the research process using examples from our qualitative doctoral research.
In experimental pragmatics, we typically present participants with a variety of different stimuli and measure their responses in some instructed manner. This allows us to compute averages for a given set of stimuli and learn about the overall patterns of how people respond to various experimental conditions. However, there are many within-individual factors that can affect people’s pragmatic performances, including their individual learning styles and past experiences.
To fully understand what people really mean when they use language, we need to account for these nuances. To do this, a theory of pragmatics must include a recognition that utterance interpretation is never neutral or task-free. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is central to a pragmatic view of the world. It is this perspective that distinguishes pragmatism from more idealistic, less flexible theories of meaning and language.