Pragmatic is a philosophical perspective that originated in the United States around 1870, and now represents a growing third alternative to analytic and ‘Continental’ traditions worldwide. It was largely defined and developed by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his close friend William James (1842-1910), though Peirce was quick to recognise the important contributions of their Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (1855-1916), who was allied with absolute idealism but who shared many of pragmatism’s concerns.
The core of pragmatism as conceived by these early pragmatists was ‘the pragmatic maxim’, a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their implications for experience in specific situations. This prompted a distinctive epistemological outlook, characterised by fallibilist appraisal of evidence and a broad-based alethic pluralism. It also produced a theory of truth that differed from realism broadly construed, favouring a pragmatic monism (following Peirce) or an alethic pluralism (following James).
One of the more recent developments in pragmatist philosophy is the revival of an approach to semantics referred to as ‘pragmatic semantics’. The aim of this approach is to liberate language from the assumption that it functions merely as a transcript of reality. Its advocates, like Robert Brandom, argue that a combination of perception and rule-following augmented by some species of ampliative inference — induction, inference to the best explanation or Bayesian reasoning, for example — can produce an account of what we actually mean when we use words such as ‘true’ or’refer to’.
This approach to semantics is now complemented by a number of other pragmatic research programmes, such as relevance theory and the theory of conversational implicature. In addition, there is experimental, clinical and intercultural pragmatics, as well as historical pragmatics.
A pragmatist perspective is also a useful one for analysing issues of social concern. For example, a pragmatic view of cognitive behavioral therapy stresses the importance of changing beliefs about how to deal with challenging situations rather than simply trying to change how a person behaves.
Similarly, a pragmatic view of the causes and consequences of war emphasizes the need to minimise casualties, rather than the desire to eliminate all military conflict. Finally, a pragmatic perspective on the ethics of genetic engineering suggests that we should test new technologies on animals before they are used in humans. This is because we should be prepared for the worst, as we can never know how safe or dangerous a technology might prove to be in practice. For this reason, pragmatic approaches are often favoured by people who are concerned about the ethical impact of their work.