Pragmatism | Definition, History, & Examples (2024)

pragmatism, school of philosophy, dominant in the United States in the first quarter of the 20th century, based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of experience over fixed principles, and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings from their consequences and their truths from their verification. Thus, ideas are essentially instruments and plans of action.

Achieving results, i.e., “getting things done” in business and public affairs, is often said to be “pragmatic.” There is a harsher and more brutal connotation of the term in which any exercise of power in the successful pursuit of practical and specific objectives is called “pragmatic.” The character of American business and politics is often so described. In these cases “pragmatic” carries the stamp of justification: a policy is justified pragmatically if it is successful. The familiar and the academic conceptions have in common an opposition to invoking the authority of precedents or of abstract and ultimate principles. Thus, in law judicial decisions that have turned on the weighing of consequences and probable general welfare rather than on being deduced from precedents have been called pragmatic.

The word pragmatism is derived from the Greek pragma (“action,” or “affair”). The Greek historian Polybius (died 118 bce) called his writings “pragmatic,” meaning thereby that they were intended to be instructive and useful to his readers. In his introduction to Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) commented on this “pragmatical” approach as the second kind of reflective historiography, and for that genre he cited Johannes von Müller’s History of the World (Eng. trans. 1840). As the American psychologist and leading pragmatist William James remarked, “The term is derived from the same Greek word pragma meaning action, from which the words ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come.” The American logician Charles S. Peirce, another pioneering pragmatist, may have been the first to use the word to designate a specific philosophical doctrine. But Peirce had Immanuel Kant’s German term rather than the Greek word in mind. Pragmatisch refers to experimental, empirical, and purposive thought “based on and applying to experience.” In the philosophy of education, the notion that children learn by doing, that critical standards of procedure and understanding emerge from the application of concepts to directly experienced subject matters, has been called “pragmatic.” Within linguistics, “pragmatics” refers to the subfield that studies the relation of the language user to the words or other signs being used.

Major theses of philosophic pragmatism

During the first quarter of the 20th century, pragmatism was the most influential philosophy in the United States, exerting an impact on the study of law, education, political and social theory, art, and religion. Six fundamental theses of this philosophy can be distinguished. It is, however, unlikely that any one thinker would have subscribed to them all, and even on points of agreement, varying interpretations mark the thought and temper of the major pragmatists. The six theses are:

1. Responsive to idealism and evolutionary theory, pragmatists emphasized the “plastic” nature of reality and the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it. Existence is fundamentally concerned with action, which some pragmatists exalted to an almost metaphysical level. Change being an inevitable condition of life, pragmatists called attention to the ways in which change can be directed for individual and social benefit. They were consequently most critical of moral and metaphysical doctrines in which change and action are relegated to the “merely practical,” on the lowest level of the hierarchy of values. Some pragmatists anticipated the more concrete and life-centred philosophy of existentialism by arguing that only in acting—confronted with obstacles, compelled to make choices, and concerned with giving form to experience—is the individual’s being realized and discovered.

2. Pragmatism was a continuation of critical empiricism in emphasizing the priority of actual experience over fixed principles and a priori (nonexperiential) reasoning in critical investigation. For James this meant that the pragmatist

turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action.…It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against…dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.

3. The pragmatic meaning of an idea, belief, or proposition is said to reside in the distinct class of specific experimental or practical consequences that result from the use, application, or entertainment of the notion. As Peirce commented, “Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects.” For example, two propositions for which no different effects can be discerned have merely a verbal appearance of dissimilarity, and a proposition for which no definite theoretical or practical consequences can be determined is pragmatically meaningless. For pragmatists “there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.” Meaning thus has a predictive component, and some pragmatists came close to identifying the meaning of a term or proposition with the process of its verification.

4. While most philosophers have defined truth in terms of a belief’s “coherence” within a pattern of other beliefs or as the “correspondence” between a proposition and an actual state of affairs, pragmatism, in contrast, generally held that truth, like meaning, is to be found in the process of verification. Thus, truth simply is the verification of a proposition, or the successful working of an idea. Crudely, truth is “what works.” Less crudely and more theoretically, truth is, in Peirce’s words, the “limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.” For John Dewey, founder of the instrumentalist school of pragmatism, these are beliefs “warranted” by inquiry.

5. In keeping with their understanding of meaning and truth, pragmatists interpreted ideas as instruments and plans of action. In contrast to the conception of ideas as images and copies of impressions or of external objects, pragmatist theories emphasized the functional character of ideas: ideas are suggestions and anticipations of possible conduct; they are hypotheses or forecasts of what will result from a given action; they are ways of organizing behaviour in the world rather than replicas of the world. Ideas are thus analogous in some respects to tools; they are efficient, useful, and valuable, or not, depending on the role that they play in contributing to the successful direction of behaviour.

6. In methodology, pragmatism was a broad philosophical attitude toward the formation of concepts, hypotheses, and theories and their justification. For pragmatists, the individual’s interpretations of reality are motivated and justified by considerations of their efficacy and utility in serving his interests and needs. The molding of language and theorizing are likewise subject to the critical objective of maximum usefulness according to humanity’s various purposes.