Pragmatic is a word used to describe people and actions that take a realistic approach. This means they don’t get stuck on big-picture ideals or emotions and are able to make practical calls that can be applied to a specific situation. It can also be used as an adjective to describe someone who can think clearly and calmly in the heat of the moment and makes practical decisions.
Pragmatism is a philosophical school that emphasizes the connection between thought and action. Its tenets are widely applied in fields such as psychology, sociology, political science and leadership studies. In philosophy, pragmatism is considered a third alternative to analytic and continental traditions. Pragmatism was first developed in the United States by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and influenced by such allied scholars as Josiah Royce and John Dewey. It has since spread throughout the world and continues to thrive as a major intellectual movement.
Although a philosophical school, pragmatism is often mischaracterized as a view that reduces all knowledge to mere sense experience or that only considers facts as evidence. In fact, Peirce was a strong critic of such narrow views and saw pragmatics as a more sophisticated approach that could take into account the richer nature of human experience. In his later writings, he coined the term “pragmatism” to contrast it with the more restricted definitions of truth and reality that had been popular in his earlier days.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of philosophers developed a theory of pragmatism based on their own experiences, ideas and research. These included Peirce’s colleague and friend, William James, who adapted the concept of pragmaticism to the philosophy of mind and became an important popularizer of it. James emphasized that a philosophical idea is not meaningful unless it can be applied to real-world experience and problems.
Modern pragmatism is still developing, but it has been influential in diverse disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethics, political science, economics and law. It is also being used in business as a strategy for analyzing and improving organizational processes.
Some of the most well-known neopragmatists have been Herbert Spencer, Richard Rorty and Alfred North Whitehead, while current leading figures include Robert M. Pirsig and Russell A. Brandom. The former has been criticized for neglecting Peirce’s concept of the pragmatist community of inquirers, while the latter has been critical of some of Peirce’s assumptions about how truth is established.
In recent years, many philosophers have been combining classical pragmatism with other schools of thought, such as analytic philosophy and existentialism. This has resulted in a wide range of new theories of meaning and truth, some of which are compatible with Peirce’s original notions of pragmatism. The pragmatist concept of truth is now being explored in the context of a broad range of non-correspondence theories of truth, including disquotationalism and minimalism. Some of these are influenced by pragmatism and some are not, but they all share the same fundamental concern with understanding how truth is established in different situations.