What Is Pragmatic Philosophy?

Pragmatic is a philosophical term used to describe choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable. The word pragmatic derives from the Latin word pragma, which means “to do” or “to act.” It is also closely related to the Greek word praxi, meaning action. The words practice and praxis also share the same root.

Although pragmatic is often associated with the philosophy of John Dewey, it has a long history in other branches of philosophy as well. Dewey’s followers developed pragmatist perspectives upon the relations between self and other, science and ethics, and philosophy of education. Later, pragmatism found new expressions in sociology and anthropology and in the study of human communication.

While classical pragmatists focused on how language and thought are adapted to the world, recent philosophers have been more concerned with what pragmatic concepts can tell us about truth, value, and knowledge. In particular, Richard Rorty turned consciously to pragmatism in an attempt to correct what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s crucial mistake of naively conceiving that the world is mirrored by our language and thought. His bold and iconoclastic attack on this “representationalism” birthed a so-called neopragmatism to which many philosophers have since contributed (see, for example, Putnam, Brandom, and Price).

Contemporary pragmatists are still concerned with the way we understand our language and our relationships with one another. They also focus on the ways that social, cultural, and situational factors can influence how our language is understood. This branch of pragmatism is called pragmatics and it is generally characterized by a theory of communicative intention that is based on the Gricean Maxims: Be clear. Be brief. Be relevant to the subject at hand. Be respectful.

In addition to these theoretical concerns, pragmatics also has rich applications in other fields of inquiry. For instance, computational pragmatics (also known as pragmatic natural language processing) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that applies pragmatic concepts to help computer systems better approximate real-world human languages and information processing abilities. The goal of computational pragmatics is to allow computers to respond to ambiguous input by leveraging contextual information to work out the likely meaning of an utterance.

This article has only touched the surface of the vast number of topics that a philosophical movement like pragmatics can address. In the future, this article will explore other areas in which a pragmatic approach may be helpful. In addition, this article will discuss a variety of philosophical movements that draw inspiration from pragmatism and attempt to extend its ideas in their own distinctive manners. We will also consider how a pragmatic approach can be incorporated into the study of philosophical issues such as metaphysics, morality, and epistemology. By taking a pragmatic approach to these issues, we can make more progress in understanding these challenging and fascinating questions. This is a vitally important task in our increasingly interconnected, globalized world. We must develop a shared framework for understanding and addressing these important issues.