- What is the pragmatic?
- Examples of Pragmatism in Everyday Life
- Basic principles of the philosophical current of pragmatism
- Pragmatics of language
We explain what is pragmatic in a colloquial sense and everyday examples. Also the pragmatic in philosophy and linguistics.
What is the pragmatic?
In our day to day, we use the adjective pragmatic to refer to a attitude in life that privileges the useful, the practical and the concrete, and not the abstract, the theoretical and the ideal.
We call people with this trait pragmatic, and are generally considered ideal for decision making immediate actions in an efficient way, since they do not tend to go around the bush or get involved in useless considerations. At the same time, they are usually considered more "earthly" people, less given to reflection and imagination.
However, this use is hardly a colloquial and common sense of the word, whose origins go back to the Greek pragmatikós, with which they used to name the skilled people to negotiate. The term can be used, to roughly, to refer to any approach in any matter, as long as it privileges the practical over the theoretical.
On the other hand the pragmatism is a doctrine philosophical born in the United States at the end of the XIX century, fruit of the thought of Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952).
According to its own creators, it was more of a way of thinking than of a philosophical current, whose central postulate can be summarized in that the theory it must be extracted from the practice (and not the other way around), and then applied to the practice itself (that is, to its improvement) in order to achieve an intelligent practice.
Pragmatism, true to its pragmatic attitude, did not become a theoretical current, but was applied unevenly to different areas of human knowledge: education, the psychology, the right, the politics, etc., always in pursuit of the recovery of reason and human values in order to obtain intelligent and liberating actions, responsible in all areas of human life.
This current dominated thought in the United States until the WWII, when it gave way to neopositivism and different religious conceptions of spiritual life.
Examples of Pragmatism in Everyday Life
A pragmatic attitude in everyday life is one that focuses on the practical resolution of problems and not on ruminating theoretically what should be done. The following situations may be examples of this:
- When it comes to cooking, a pragmatic person makes a meal from the food in the pantry, even if they have to disobey or reinvent the recipe, rather than follow it to the letter or discard it if it lacks ingredients .
- A pragmatic person prefers to buy the most useful and necessary instruments for his work, instead of those that have a neater appearance or that can be ornamental.
- When a political party decides to make a pact with a party with a contrary ideological tendency, in which both will benefit from quotas of power, it can be said that it is exercising politics in a very pragmatic way.
Basic principles of the philosophical current of pragmatism
The fundamental postulate of philosophical pragmatism was enunciated by Pierce in the nineteenth century, as the "principle of pragmatism", and dictates that the meaning of the truth can only be determined by your utility in the life. This means that the unique value of things is the value that determines their usefulness, their ability to solve problems in concrete life.
Thus, for example, philosophical discussions are resolved, from a pragmatic point of view, by comparing their "practical" consequences: the truth, then, is what works best for us. In other words, that which satisfies the subjective interests of the individual.
Pragmatics of language
In the field of linguistics, on the other hand, is known as pragmatics or pragmalinguistics to a discipline that studies the context of the meanings of language, that is, that it studies the situation in which the linguistic act is carried out, taking into account the influence and relevance in the communication of all non-linguistic factors.
Thus, pragmatics studies what accompanies language: gestures, proxemics, the physical elements present in the communicative situation, the knowledge shared by the speakers, etc. Everything that does not concern the semantics, because it is not linguistic (that is, because it has nothing to do with language itself), it is then within the area of interest of pragmatics.