Pragmatic is a word that describes someone or something that takes a realistic approach to situations. For example, a pragmatic four-year-old doesn’t expect a birthday party filled with unicorns. Pragmatism is also a philosophy that believes that only actions and their consequences matter, not ideas or theories about what could or should be.
A person who is pragmatic often has good communication skills, which are necessary for both learning and collaborating with peers. These abilities also make an important contribution to people’s social-emotional and psychological wellbeing. For instance, research shows that pragmatically proficient adults are better liked by others and more able to take part in collaborative learning activities than those who have poorer pragmatic ability (e.g., Kemple et al., 1992).
Although the term pragmatism has a long history in philosophy and is used in many different ways, there is not yet a unified definition of what makes someone a pragmatist. Nevertheless, some themes and theses have loomed large in pragmatist thought.
Some important pragmatist thinkers include Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty. This school of thought is sometimes called American pragmatism because many of its proponents were Americans, but it can be distinguished from other philosophies with similar roots such as existentialism and phenomenology.
A central tenet of American pragmatism is that human knowledge is partial and fallible. However, this does not entail a global skeptical attitude or a radical philosophical skepticism that is distinct from scientific skepticism. Instead, a pragmatic philosophy reconciles anti-skepticism with fallibilism and argues that any knowledge is useful for practical purposes (e.g., predicting the weather).
Among other things, pragmatic philosophers believe that truth is whatever works and that values are determined by what actually happens. This means that it is not merely possible to identify true values, but it is also possible to create practical policies to realize them. For example, it is possible to make a society kinder by implementing laws that encourage civility or to reduce the suffering of war by using military technology to control civilian casualties.
Experimental pragmatics involves the study of how people understand linguistic and non-linguistic communication. It is an enormously complex field that offers a range of conflicting results, reflecting the ongoing struggle with methodological standardization within psychology and other disciplines (the so-called “replication crisis”). This variation is partly due to the fact that different participants in a pragmatic experiment may interpret a particular utterance differently.
It is essential for pragmatic researchers to understand these differences in order to develop a more sophisticated theory of communication that can account for the diverse meanings that people understand, both between and within individuals (e.g., a person understanding an utterance to be ironic more quickly than another person).