Pragmatic is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions of the nature and meaning of language and the ways in which words are used. It is closely related to semantics, but differs in important respects. The central premise of pragmatics is that the significance of any expression is determined by its context. Hence the phrase “the meaning of a word is what it means in a particular context.”
The first generation of pragmatists, including Peirce and James, worked out an original a posteriori epistemology and various forms of empiricism. They also developed a metaphysics that left open the possibility of transcendent realities. But the pragmatist project soon expanded to include other disciplines. It now is a significant sub-discipline of philosophy, and has its own journals, societies and collections of papers.
Contemporary pragmatists work in many fields, from epistemology and metaphysics to linguistic theory and sociology. Pragmatics is also a major part of natural language processing (seen as an aspect of artificial intelligence) and has its own journals, conferences and societies. Computational pragmatics seeks to understand the way a computer system interprets human input, such as words and sentences, by analysing the context in which they are used. Reference resolution, for instance, is an important area of computational pragmatics: it involves determining what the actual facts are that a computer system needs in order to know whether the word u is referring to Elwood or Eloise, for example.
Some pragmatists are now examining the relationship between language and action, especially in relation to social issues. Others, such as Robert Brandom, are working on a metaphysics that includes elements of pragmatism and phenomenology. He has argued that there is a fundamental link between a pragmatist account of truth and a view of the nature of reality.
A third group of pragmatists are looking at the wider philosophical implications of pragmatism, for example in relation to metaphysics, epistemology, ontology and politics. They have developed a form of Quinean naturalism, and have been influential in the philosophy of science, in philosophical aesthetics, in ethics and in questions concerning the nature of truth and value.
Other pragmatists have been critical of reified ideas in traditional philosophy and have sought to bring a fresh, pragmatic approach to the study of ancient, medieval and modern philosophers. They have worked on the philosophies of Husserl, Hegel and Wittgenstein, for example. And still others have worked to place pragmatism in a wider historical context, for example by examining the ways in which classical pragmatists have been influenced by a variety of philosophies and movements. This is an expanding field and a lively debate continues to take place. See the Bibliography below for a list of books which contain collections of papers by classic and contemporary pragmatists. It also provides links to relevant websites and to online versions of many of these works. It is particularly helpful for students of the works of Peirce and Dewey.