Pragmatic refers to the way in which a person deals with matters of fact and considers results and consequences. A person who demonstrates this trait is often considered to be practical and reasonable. It is a way of thinking that is often contrasted with the idealism of a person who has high principles and ideals.
The philosophical tradition of pragmatism emphasizes practical consequences in the determination of meaning, truth, and value. It is a response to the modern academic skepticism that emerged from Descartes and has much in common with an older skeptical tradition. Pragmatism also carries the implication that we never fully grasp reality and that knowledge is always provisional.
It is also a way of viewing language and communication which emphasises the role of context in understanding what is being communicated. This is called near-side pragmatics and it contrasts with the more conventionally or literally interpreted semantics of words and sentences which is far-side pragmatics.
A number of disciplines have developed rich pragmatist perspectives. The fields of linguistics, psychology and philosophy have embraced pragmatism. Some of the most important pragmatist developments occurred in the early twentieth century with the appearance of Dewey and Rorty. Other pragmatist developments are still being made today, as for example in the area of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
In 1907 William James published a series of lectures entitled ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking’. He identified what he called ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’, an apparently irresolvable clash between two ways of thinking. The tough-minded, he claimed, are committed to the empirist principle of going by what works and the tender-minded prefer a priori principles that appeal to reason. Pragmatism was intended to bridge this gap.
The pragmatist view of epistemology is original a posteriori. It is a method of knowing which develops from the experience of discovery and exploration, not from some abstract concept of knowledge. It reflects the ancient Greek idea that truth is discovered by experiment, and that the test of this is in the way it works in practice. It is a form of rationalistic empiricism and it does not exclude the possibility that transcendent realities exist.
In a similar vein, the 1929 book Mind and the World Order by John Dewey and, half a century later, Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Experience set out an epistemology which is at once a philosophy of religion and a philosophy of science. Its central feature is that the relationship between religion and science is a matter of epistemic rather than ontological issues. It is not, as the theists argue, that a naturalistic explanation of religion would degrade it to mere’mindstuff’, but that such a degrading assumption is itself an artefact of the language and concepts used in the discussion. This is a form of pragmatist epistemology which can be described as conceptual pragmatism.