PRAGMATISM

school of philosophy, dominant in the United States during 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, "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 goes back to the Greek pragma ("action," "affair"). The Greek historian Polybius (died 118 BC) called his writings "pragmatic," meaning thereby that they were intended to be instructive and useful to his readers. In his introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hegel commented on this "pragmatical" approach as the second kind of reflective history, and for this genre he cited Johannes von Mller's History of the World (Eng. trans. 1840). As the 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." Charles Peirce, another pioneering Pragmatist, who may have been the first to use the word to designate a specific philosophic doctrine, had 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." In semiotics, the general theory of language, that part which studies the relation of the user to the words or other signs being used, is called pragmatics (as distinct from semantics and syntax).