pragmatist
/ˈpraɡmətɪst
/noun
1A person who is guided more by practical considerations than by ideals: hardheaded pragmatists firmly rooted in the real world...
- Often the visionary has to work hand in glove with a pragmatist to get results.
- The cruel potentate is toppled by a vengeful pragmatist who can't wait to get his hands on his mineral resources.
- Edison is the paradigm of the blind pragmatist, making hundreds of bad prototypes to 'bottle' light.
2 Philosophy An advocate of the approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application: American pragmatists have influenced a great deal of recent philosophy of many types [as modifier]: the foundations of pragmatist philosophy...
- It should be noted that the abductive method is associated with the pragmatist school of philosophy, which does not hold a realist view of knowledge.
- In practice, being a pragmatist is much more like being a realist than a crude relativist.
- A pragmatist does not think that what we <i>think</i> is true is the same as what <i>is</i> true, since we may think something to be true which doesn't work.
Derivatives
pragmatistic
- If science tells us only about 'reality' in the anti-realist, pragmatistic sense, then there's absolutely no reason one shouldn't think that 'reality' is naturalistic.
- He ends up with a highly pragmatistic conception of theoretical language hardly worthy of someone preoccupied with a rigorously scientific conception of the world.
- Applying the pragmatisitic method is not merely a matter of clarifying the actual and potential significations of such habits as we happen to have acquired.