Pragmatic is the approach of looking at things in a practical way. This means that you take into account all of the facts before making a decision. A pragmatic person is willing to adapt their beliefs and opinions in order to achieve the most positive results. For example, a person might decide to save wildlife by putting down traps rather than advocating for strict laws that would prohibit hunting altogether. In business, being pragmatic can be a great way to make deals that benefit everyone involved.
The word pragmatic is also used to describe a philosophical position that emphasizes the importance of the effects of action, as opposed to the principles and theories that underlie it. The pragmatist perspective is often associated with a belief in human rationality and the ability of humans to learn through experience. This perspective is often contrasted with other more theoretical philosophical approaches that emphasize the importance of principles and theories, such as idealism.
One of the most significant issues in pragmatism involves its relationship to epistemology and, in particular, to the concept of truth. Classical pragmatists, such as Peirce and James, developed a pragmatic maxim for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their ‘practical consequences’ – their implications for experience in specific situations. This produced a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist and anti-Cartesian explication of the norms that govern inquiry.
More recently, the concept of ‘pragmatism’ has been broadened to include a wide variety of views in other areas of philosophy. This includes views concerning the nature of the self, and views of the nature of knowledge, including the nature of scientific knowledge and the role of experience in its acquisition. It is also used in a broader sense to refer to an approach to ethics that stresses the importance of the morality of what we do and the ways in which it can be justified by our values.
Contemporary pragmatism is most closely associated with the philosophical study of language, known as semantics or pragmatics. This is a branch of philosophy that investigates the various ways in which the meaning of words can vary from one context to another, owing to ambiguity or indexicality, or both. It also investigates the way that the meaning of sentences, and the overall meaning of discourse, can be worked out using contextual information.
Amongst other things, pragmatics investigates the way in which we can work out what a speaker meant when they said something and the way in which they intended that what they said should be understood by their audience. This is a large and complex field that is often contrasted with the more narrowly defined scientific study of language, which, for example, examines the relations between signs and their denotations.
A number of philosophers have developed a range of different views about pragmatics, with some concentrating on its interaction with grammar, others taking a more general view of linguistic meaning and the way in which this is influenced by the environment in which it occurs, and others focusing on speech act theory or other empirical psychological models of utterance interpretation. Overall, there are three main tendencies in contemporary pragmatism: those who view it largely as a philosophical project along the lines of Grice; those who concentrate on its interaction with semantics; and those who regard it as an empirical psychological theory of communication.