Pragmatic is a philosophy of language and communication that takes seriously the fact that meaning varies across contexts. It seeks to explain how the significance that we attach to words — whether conventional or literal — is supplemented by more general principles, working out of the relevant context. Its most important branches include speech act theory, the theory of ambiguity and indexicality, and the theory of conversational implicature.
The term pragmatics was coined by William James in a series of lectures delivered in 1907. He saw that the history of philosophy is to a large extent the story of a clash between two ways of thinking, the ‘tough-minded’ and the ‘tender-minded’. The tough-minded have an empiricist commitment to experience and a desire to go by the facts; the tender-minded prefer a priori principles that appeal to ratiocination. Pragmatism aims to bridge this gap between theory and practice.
Classical pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey developed methods for clarifying concepts and hypotheses through a process of tracing their implications in experiences, thus producing a distinctive a posteriori epistemology. They also critiqued prevailing individualist ontologies by developing a concept of power-with rather than power-over in institutional settings. George Herbert Mead, who studied with Royce and James at Radcliffe/Harvard, and Mary Parker Follett developed important pragmatist perspectives on the relations between the self and the community (Mead 1934).
However, early pragmatists were divided over questions of realism broadly conceived. They were split between those who favored a scientific, monism-based approach to truth (Pearce), and those who favored a broad alethic pluralism in which the concept of truth is indeterminate and derived by means of inquiry (James).
The philosophical pragmatists who followed them have made rich contributions across many other areas of philosophy, including ethics, philosophy of science, social philosophy, history of ideas, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. This entry will explore some of these contributions, in particular the pragmatist insights that have contributed to discourse ethics and, more generally, to near-side pragmatics, as distinct from the far-side pragmatics that characterizes classical pragmatism.
While neopragmatism owes its resurgence to the fact that it addresses pressing practical problems, it has suffered from a failure to engage with some of classical pragmatism’s key concepts. For example, neopragmatists such as Brandom have focused solely on linguistic meaning, while neglecting the idea of ‘experience’, which classical pragmatism emphasized. They have also tended to focus exclusively on a particular form of inference, namely induction, and not the more general species of ampliative inference that classical pragmatism envisioned. In doing so, they have missed the chance to contribute to a dialogue between the two traditions that could have been a fruitful collaboration.