Pragmatic is a word that describes someone who prioritizes results and practicality in their decision-making. Those who are pragmatic value real-world implications and are willing to compromise in order to achieve their goals.
To be pragmatic is to make choices that have the best chance of being effective in a particular situation. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how the decisions are made. For example, if you are trying to save wildlife, it might be pragmatic to settle a lawsuit rather than spend time and money fighting it out in court. Taking a pragmatic approach is also beneficial when trying to get people to understand your viewpoint on a controversial issue.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – broadly speaking – understands knowledge of the world to be inseparable from agency within it. It has attracted a wide range of sometimes contradictory interpretations, including that all philosophical concepts should be subject to scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if it proves useful, that the mind/body distinction and analytic/synthetic distinction are mere illusions, that experience consists in transacting with nature rather than representing it, and that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never fully be represented in representational form.
It has a strong American origin in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1847–1912), William James (1902–1904) and John Dewey (1897–1955), but its influence was also felt abroad. The work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge in the 1920s brought a new impetus to pragmatic thinking about statistical reasoning and inquiry (Misak 2018). Wittgenstein’s later thought acquired a pragmatist flavour through conversations with Ramsey and through his reading of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.
While pragmatism’s intellectual centre of gravity continues to shift out of North America, it remains an active and growing philosophy in many parts of the world. There are vibrant research networks in South America, Scandinavia and, more recently, central Europe and China.
Among contemporary philosophers, a broad consensus has emerged that pragmatism is an essential perspective for understanding how the natural and social sciences work, how we should evaluate the claims of science, how we should approach issues in public life and the challenges of environmental ethics. Some of the best articulations of these themes are found in the work of Richard Rorty (1924–2001), Hilary Putnam (2004; 2012) and Robert C. Taylor (2001). Moreover, the pragmatist tradition in general has become increasingly globalized as more and more pragmatic philosophers have come to know of each other. This has facilitated cross-pollination of ideas, as well as productive debate between different strands of pragmatism. The pragmatist perspective is one that can serve as an antidote to the deadlock in philosophy and other disciplines, where theorists tend to get stuck in ideologically defensive positions. This has important implications for how we think about the future of the human project on our planet and beyond. It might also have profound consequences for the ways in which we understand our relationships with other species on earth.