pragmatistn.adj.

1640 E. Reynolds Treat. Passions xvi. 176 We may [say] of Pragmatists, that their eyes looke alwaies save onely inward.

1665 R. Brathwait Captive-captain 72 As for Commissionary Employments, though poorly vers'd in such addresses, this officious Pragmatist would ever make one, if either his Personal Application to the Parties interessed, or the free offer of himself would procure his admittance.

1863 C. C. Clarke Shakespeare-characters viii. 209 He is a moral teetotaller, a formalist, a pragmatist.

1876 Atlantic Monthly Nov. 553/1 An exalted pragmatist, perpetual projection of himself against antagonists was necessary to his very being.

1892 W. Wallace tr. G. W. F. Hegel Logic (ed. 2) viii. 257 The motives which must be viewed by the pragmatist as really efficient.

1907 Church Times 8 Feb. 178 The pragmatist takes religion as he finds it, a working life;..he studies the Christian life, and considers that the best way to study it is to live it;..he is content to leave many things unexplained.

1938 Ironwood (Mich.) Daily Globe 11 July 5/2 The British are pragmatists and have a tendency to accept any fait accompli.

1942 Mind 51 67 The Pragmatist holds that what works is true.

1972 N. McInnes Western Marxists i. 44 The pragmatists imagined that in the Theses on Feuerbach Marx was asking ‘How do we know?’ and was answering, ‘By activity’.

1985 C. Jencks Mod. Movements in Archit. (ed. 2) ii. 105 Nominalist philosophers and pragmatists, who believe that universals do not in fact exist, would find the Platonic statements of Mies mostly just humorous, because they go to such terrific pains to project a non-existent reality.

1988 H. C. R. Landon Mozart's Last Year ii. 33 Mozart was a supreme pragmatist and finished his works exclusively with a specific performance in view.

2003 New Republic 10 Nov. 14/1 Conservative pragmatists have been influential in the on-again, off-again back-channel talks between Iranian and American officials in the past year.

2005 Chicago Tribune (Nexis) 17 Aug. c3 On one hand, yes, it is..a beauty contest, and the feminist in me rolls my eyes. But the pragmatist in me says that the average person likes beauty contests.

1903 Hibbert Jrnl. Mar. 578 The evidence for a pragmatist interpretation of the reason.

1918 R. S. Bourne in Seven Arts Oct. 692 What concerns us here is the relative ease with which the pragmatist intellectuals..have moved out their philosophy, bag and baggage, from education to war.

1972 A. J. Ayer Russell i. 19 Some criticism of both pragmatist and idealist theories of truth.

1993 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 2 Dec. 34/1 This is the pragmatist razor, which Dewey would later use to try to slice to pieces what he regarded as the paper problems of traditional metaphysics.