Pragmatic is a word often used in the context of making decisions or choices that are considered to be practical and reasonable. It is a philosophy which seeks to solve problems through solutions that will work in the real world, rather than trying to come up with perfect theories that have never been tested. The pragmatist approach can be applied to many areas of life, from politics and business to medicine and art. The pragmatic approach can help resolve conflicts in relationships and in business by focusing on what works, rather than arguing over perfect ideals.
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that originated in discussions among a group of Harvard students, including Peirce and James. The movement gained momentum in the 1870s and grew rapidly in popularity through a series of lectures James gave. It became popular in the United States because it seemed to provide a new name for some old ways of thinking, as well as providing a solution to the seeming insoluble philosophical disputes that were going on at that time.
A major feature of classical pragmatism was its emphasis on the need for an original a posteriori epistemology. This was to be achieved by a method of clarification and verification which allowed us to progress from the’second-grade’ meaning of definitions to the ‘third-grade’ understanding of terms derived from observable facts. The process would be based on the Pragmatic Maxim, that there are no empty disputes in knowledge.
Several contemporary philosophers have made important contributions to pragmatics. There are the ‘Literalists’, who see pragmatics as basically independent of semantics; the ‘contextualists’, who adopt the basic outlines of Grice’s Relevance Theory and its views of the role of pragmatics in utterance interpretation; and the ‘pragmatists’ who see pragmatics as an empirical psychological study of utterance meaning. These last are perhaps the closest to a unification of pragmatism’s two original roots, with their clear ideas of pragmatic ‘intrusion’ into semantics and their emphasis on conversational implicatures.
There is also a substantial subdiscipline of computational pragmatics, which addresses the problem of allowing computers to understand human languages. This involves providing a computer with a database of information and a set of algorithms that allow it to respond appropriately in particular situations. Reference resolution, which concerns how a computer system determines whether two items share the same referent, is a central issue in computational pragmatics. A number of liberatory philosophies, such as feminists (Seigfried 1996; Keith and Hester 2001), disability studies (Keith 2002) and Native American philosophy (Sullivan 1998; Skagestad 1981) have also looked to pragmatics for their philosophical base. A variety of fields also draw on pragmatism for guidance, such as medical ethics and ecology.