Pragmatic is an approach to philosophical problems that focuses on the practical consequences of actions and arguments rather than on their formal properties such as truth and validity. It originated in the United States around 1870 and forms a growing third alternative to analytic philosophy and the continental or ‘Continental’ traditions worldwide. First generation pragmatists included Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his colleague William James (1842-1910). Peirce’s influence spread through many branches of the social sciences including sociology, psychoanalysis and education. Other pragmatists included the evolutionary psychologist George Herbert Mead and pioneering African-American philosopher W.E.B Du Bois.
The main strand of pragmatism is the pragmatic theory of meaning, which is the central theme of James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this he develops a heuristic, or practical, philosophy of religion that emphasises how something works and its benefits, rather than its ontological claims, and leaves the door open for supernatural realities.
More recently, a more general pragmatics has emerged that emphasises the context-dependence of different aspects of linguistic interpretation. This is called the ‘pragmatics of language’ and it covers topics such as the way that one sentence can have different meanings in different contexts, owing to ambiguity or indexicality or both, speech act theory, and the theory of conversational implicature.
Other pragmatist philosophers have reflected on epistemology and the nature of human agency, and have developed a wide variety of practical theories about morality, ethics, anthropology, and education. A particular focus has been on the role of ‘intention’ in action and in language. This has been taken further in the ‘pragmatics of communication’, an important branch of pragmatics that deals with speaker intentions and how they are realized in the language of utterances.
There are also ‘pragmatics of learning’ and ‘pragmatics of medicine’ and other areas of practice that are important to philosophy. For example, the pragmatist view of cognitive behavioral therapy stresses that people can change how they think about and react to specific situations through training. This is a practical and effective approach that differs from the more traditional approach of psychotherapy, which is more concerned with analysing past experiences to try to predict how a person will react in future situations.
A major recent development in pragmatism is the work of Jurgen Habermas, who has combined analytic philosophy’s goal of systematically analysing language with a neo-Marxian and hermeneutic criticism of modernity and Meade’s pragmatist analysis of the irremediably social nature of the self. He has also developed a ‘pragmatist’ theory of rationality and action that draws upon Mead’s concept of communicative action to develop an anti-instrumental rationality. This is a broad and sophisticated theory that has wide-ranging implications for the whole of philosophy.