Pragmatic is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly speaking – understands knowing the world to be inseparable from agency within it. It has attracted a remarkably rich and diverse body of work, with contributions from philosophers, psychologists and social scientists in all disciplines. It has also provoked a number of counter-revolutions against it, most notably Richard Rorty’s iconoclastic attack on what he saw as its naive conceiving of language and thought as mirroring the world. Since that time, pragmatism has undergone something of a revival.
The word pragmatic is derived from the Greek pragma meaning “action,” or the Latin praxis, meaning “practice.” Thus it is a philosophy of action, and its core concern is that knowledge is nothing other than the way in which we enact our lives and conduct our affairs. Pragmatism is thus a perspective that seeks to define what it means for us to be human, which in turn informs how we should approach our life together.
Pragmatism has a number of important features that distinguish it from other major philosophical traditions, most significantly its emphasis on the functional character of ideas. In contrast to the common view of ideas as impressions or copies of external objects, pragmatist theories see them as tools for shaping behaviour and predicting its outcome. As such they have a predictive component which is crucial for the pragmatist interpretation of meaning and truth.
Consequently, pragmatism has had its strongest impact in the fields of epistemology and ethics, although its reach extends to other areas as well. The first generation of pragmatists (the ‘classical pragmatists’) developed this philosophy around the 1870s, and were led by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce formulated the essentials of the pragmatist philosophy and defended it against its critics, while James shrewdly applied it to a variety of philosophical questions.
The first generation of pragmatists turned their attention to theorising inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth, while the second ‘classical’ generation largely geared its philosophical themes more explicitly towards politics, education and other dimensions of social improvement. This latter dimension was led by John Dewey and Jane Addams, who pioneered social work.
Since the 1970s, pragmatism has undergone a somewhat dramatic revival. Richard Rorty consciously returned to the pragmatist position in order to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s essential mistake – namely its naive conceiving or language and thought as’mirroring’ the world. His bold and iconoclastic attacks on this’representationalism’ birthed a new movement called neopragmatism, which has been vigorously pursued by a host of influential recent philosophers including Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. More generally, a great many analytic philosophers have sought to integrate their own philosophies with aspects of classical pragmatism (e.g., Wittgenstein). Jurgen Habermas exemplifies this phenomenon by combining analytic philosophy’s goal of systematically theorising language with pragmatist notions of communicative action and Mead’s pragmatist theory of self-knowledge. The result is a kind of hybrid that is sometimes referred to as normative pragmatics.