Pragmatic is a philosophy that deals with problems with practical consequences rather than theory. It’s also a way of thinking that determines meaning and truth through its practical consequences. The word pragmatic comes from the Greek word Progma, which means “practical.” It’s an approach to thinking that deals with real-world issues and doesn’t get bogged down in theoretical principles.
Pragmatists are known for their willingness to embrace fallibilism, a philosophical position that holds that truth is only what works in practice. They also reject dichotomies like fact/value, mind/body, and analytic/synthetic. Pragmatism has influenced many fields and people including philosophers, psychologists, and lawyers.
The term pragmatic is often confused with semantics, which is the study of words and their meanings in context. The distinction is important because it helps us understand how language can be ambiguous or misleading. It can also help explain why some sentences work in one context and not in another, such as when a sentence like “that painting was found by a tree” can have two different interpretations.
Those interpretations are determined by pragmatic factors, such as how likely they are and what the speaker’s purpose is in saying them. The pragmatic study of languages involves understanding how these factors can influence what is understood by the speakers and listeners alike. The field of pragmatics has many branches, such as the theory of conversational implicatures, speech act theory, and so on.
One of the most famous pragmatist philosophers was Peirce, who developed his concept of the Pragmatic Maxim, which is a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses through their implications for experience. Peirce and James used this concept to develop a distinctive epistemological outlook: a fallibilist, anti-Cartesian explication of the norms of inquiry.
The pragmatists of the 20th century turned pragmatism into a philosophy of action, particularly in politics, education, and social improvement. John Dewey and Jane Addams, for example, invented the profession of social work as a pragmatist approach to dealing with difficult issues in society.
Today, pragmatics is a wide-ranging discipline with an expansive set of theories and applications. There’s formal and computational pragmatics, theoretical and linguistic pragmatics, and clinical and experimental pragmatics, to name just a few. Pragmatics is an interdisciplinary area of study, and its influence extends to other disciplines such as psychology, biology, philosophy, history, and political science.
People who are pragmatic are often able to deal with complicated and messy situations. They have a matter-of-fact and straightforward manner of thinking, and they don’t let emotion get in the way of their work. They are also able to prioritize what is most effective in the real world and can see through the hype of idealistic theories. They’re also willing to compromise if it will lead to the desired outcome. For example, they may be able to work out an agreement with someone who isn’t their first choice because they are able to see that it will be beneficial in the long run.