"Pragmatic" seems to have been used for the first time in the modern Western philosophical tradition by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); for him, there was some connection with ethics, but little with science or technology in the modern sense. In the early twentieth century, pragmatics turns up as a third subdivision of a formal semantics triad (see Morris 1938), but it has only a remote connection to science by way of mathematics, and none to ethics or technology.

In most introductory accounts, "pragmatism" as a term for a philosophical approach is usually taken to be synonymous with a "pragmatic theory of truth." We can be sure about something if it has practical or real-world consequences. Enemies of philosophical pragmatism even caricature this as meaning that the test of the truth of a statement—even about ethics—is whether or not it works. Such characterizations are unfair to the nuanced thought of...