Pragmatic is an adjective that describes something practical, logical, or sensible. It’s often contrasted with idealistic, which describes someone who strives for perfection or believes in the highest possible goals. People who are pragmatic usually take into account a variety of factors when pursuing their goals, including costs, feasibility, and potential ramifications. They also consider their own motivations and how they might affect others.
The word pragmatic is derived from the Latin praeger, meaning “to take hold.” It’s one of the most common words in the English language and is used to describe a person, action, or plan that’s geared toward making progress rather than ideals alone.
As a philosophical movement, Pragmatism is based on the idea that truth can be determined only by examining how it’s applied in specific contexts. Its most famous principle is the Pragmatic Maxim, which states that a definition can be clarified through its implications for practice.
Pragmatism was created by Peirce and later developed into a philosophy with several different schools of thought. Some pragmatists focus on the role of truth in inquiry, while others emphasize the role of experience in knowledge formation. Others focus on pragmatics and epistemology, while still others explore how pragmatism can be applied to ethics.
A central feature of pragmatics is the concept of implicature, which describes how an utterance can imply something without saying it explicitly. For example, if your boss says, “I don’t want to know the time,” it can be inferred that you think he is ironic and isn’t actually interested in knowing when you’ll be done.
In addition to its theory of pragmatics, pragmatism has some other important ideas about truth. One of these is the correspondence theory of truth, which holds that a statement’s truth depends on whether it corresponds to an objective reality. While this view has its uses, it isn’t the only way to understand truth.
Pragmatists have also proposed a number of non-correspondence theories of truth that try to give more weight to the application of a statement in some contexts over its mere literal meaning in another. These include equivalence, anti-realism, and disquotationalism.
A more recent development in pragmatism is the approach of Henryk Brandom, who combined Sellarsian and analytic philosophy to create a form of pragmatic idealism. His work has influenced subsequent philosophers who have worked to develop an essentially analytic understanding of pragmatics. This form of pragmatism, which is sometimes called pragmatic idealism, can be seen in contemporary philosophy of language and the cognitive sciences.