Pragmatism is difficult to define because it refers to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition.  Figures with little in common, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Isaac Levi, Reinhold Niebuhr, and George Herbert Mead, have been associated with pragmatism.

C.S. Peirce is credited as the wellspring of pragmatism, in part because he used the term “pragmatism” to refer to his writings and teachings. Yet when his friend William James began identifying as a pragmatist, Peirce sought to rename his mode of thinking “pragmaticism” to distinguish his ideas from James’s.

More recently, Richard Rorty garnered a reputation as a pragmatist despite his deep misgivings about Peirce. James himself claimed to have learned pragmatism from reading John Stuart Mill. He called pragmatism a new name for old ways of thinking. Pragmatism, in this sense, has no fixed origin and is not confined to a single philosophical discipline attributable to any one thinker. It is, rather, a plastic concept describing an instrumental approach to solving concrete problems.

Descriptions of pragmatism are fluid and wide-ranging because of its various iterations by multiple thinkers with disparate interests and backgrounds. Pragmatism is nevertheless identifiable by certain features and qualities.

Pragmatists tend to avoid claims to unqualified certainty or universalism; they resist abstractions, closed schools of thought, and dogma that purport to have all the answers. They are searchers and seekers, never comfortable that the knowledge they have attained is complete or comprehensive.

Pragmatists seek to generate inquiry by systematically and intentionally testing ideas in the material world through practical application and sustained observation, by modifying or adapting ideas when errors are found, by subjecting ideas to a community of minds for verification (rather than leaving them to individuals in isolation), and by examining the habits and tendencies of nature and behavior for recurring, lasting themes or traits. Although pragmatists tend to be tolerant of views that have not been discounted, or open to ideas that have not been disproven, they are also prudently skeptical of ideas that have not won out in the course of history, i.e., that are unrepresented in custom or tradition.

Pragmatism is neither liberal nor conservative in the political sense, but represents a mode of knowing and understanding based on lived experience and confirmed hypotheses. Pragmatism is a constantly modified methodology for acquiring knowledge; it’s not a doctrine. It looks to ascertainable outcomes and proven results as indicia of the truth and workability of ideas.