Pragmatic is a philosophy of language, meaning, and communication. It is the study of the ways that meaning and use depend on context. It also involves examining the relationships among different vocabularies and the manner in which they are translated or reduced to one another. It is an important branch of philosophy and has had many applications in science, technology, and education.
The pragmatist tradition spawned a number of prominent philosophers, ranging from Peirce and James to Dewey and Rorty. However, there is no pragmatist creed; it is not possible to cite a definitive list of the essential tenets endorsed by all or even most pragmatists. Still, there are certain ideas that have loomed large over the course of pragmatist history.
One of the most familiar pragmatist ideas concerns truth and knowledge. For the classical pragmatists, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, for William James, a statement is true only if it has some sort of psychological effect. For example, a person may believe that prayers are heard because it comforts them. Nevertheless, this does not prove that the belief is true; for that would require further evidence.
Another pragmatist idea relates to the limits of science and the nature of meaning and value. As a result, pragmatists often oppose reductionism, which claims that all meaningful things can be boiled down to a physical cause. Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature and Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argue that reductionism is flawed because it assumes that all experience, including religious experience, is merely a reflection of the physical world.
Modern pragmatists have developed a number of philosophical theories that have had profound influence in areas such as education, business, and the law. In addition, there are a variety of specialized fields that have drawn on the philosophy of pragmatism. For instance, computational pragmatics is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence that uses the pragmatist view of human meaning to help computer systems understand how best to interpret human language and information.
Although there are a number of pragmatist ideas that have had great influence, the movement has its critics. Some of these critics argue that the pragmatist philosophy of truth and knowledge is too lenient and that it leads to moral relativism, nihilism, or absurdism. Other critics have noted that pragmatism does not provide a sufficiently robust account of how things are, and so is unsatisfactory as a foundation for scientific inquiry. In addition, some have argued that pragmatism is not a coherent philosophical position and instead consists of a hodgepodge of different ideas that are incompatible with each other. This has led some to reject pragmatism as an approach to philosophic problems. Still, others see a resurgence of interest in pragmatism and have been working to revitalise the tradition by addressing its weaknesses. They have also been working to rehabilitate classical pragmatism’s ideals of objectivity. Moreover, they have sought to bring classical pragmatism closer in line with analytic philosophy.