What Action Leaves Behind: Pragmata and the Birth of Meaning

Pragmatism is often described as a philosophy of action, a view according to which ideas acquire meaning through their practical consequences. While this description is not wrong, it is incomplete. It obscures a deeper and older conceptual structure embedded in the very word pragma, a structure that reaches back to Greek thought and only becomes fully articulate in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. When traced carefully from Greek usage through Kant and into classical pragmatism, pragmata reveals not merely a concern with action, but with the emergence of meaning from stabilized affairs—what Richardson aptly characterizes as things.

The Greek noun pragma derives from the verb prassein, meaning to do, to act, or to accomplish. Yet even in its earliest uses, pragma does not simply denote action itself. Rather, it names what action issues into: a matter, an affair, a situation, or a concrete state of affairs that now stands before us. The plural pragmata is frequently used to refer to the business of politics, the circumstances of human life, or the realities that demand attention and judgment.

Herodotus provides one of the clearest early examples of this usage. In his Histories, pragmata refers not to isolated deeds but to the unfolding course of events—the affairs of cities, the consequences of decisions, the situations that arise from human and divine action alike. When Herodotus distinguishes logoi (accounts, stories, speeches) from pragmata, he is not opposing words to actions but words to realities: what actually happened, what came to pass, what now stands as the matter to be understood. Already here, pragmata names the world as it has been shaped by action and now confronts inquiry.

This sense persists into classical philosophy. Aristotle regularly employs pragmata to denote the variable, contingent matters of ethical and political life. These are not eternal objects of theoretical knowledge but concrete situations requiring judgment. Practical wisdom (phronēsis) is precisely the capacity to navigate pragmata—those affairs that resist strict definition and demand sensitivity to context. Importantly, pragmata are neither subjective impressions nor mere movements; they are public, shared realities that emerge within human practices and persist long enough to become intelligible.

What Greek thought does not provide, however, is a theory of meaning itself. While it recognizes that judgment occurs within affairs, it does not ask how meaning arises from engagement with those affairs. That question lies dormant for centuries.

In the long interval between antiquity and modernity, the philosophical significance of pragmata largely disappears. Medieval thought reanchors meaning in divine intellect, while early modern philosophy increasingly treats meaning as representational: ideas mirror objects, and practice becomes secondary, instrumental, or merely applied. By the time philosophy reaches Kant, the gap between theory and practice has become entrenched.

Kant reintroduces the term “pragmatic” most notably in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where it designates knowledge concerned with what human beings can make of themselves in the world. Pragmatic knowledge, for Kant, is practical, worldly, and action-guiding. Yet Kant carefully restricts its scope. Meaning, cognition, and objectivity remain grounded in a priori forms and categories. Practice helps us apply concepts, but it does not generate them. The Greek intuition that meaning might arise from engagement with affairs is acknowledged only to be cordoned off.

It is not until Peirce that this restriction is decisively broken. Peirce inherits Kant’s critical discipline but rejects the confinement of practice to mere application. As a working scientist, logician, and theorist of inquiry, Peirce approaches meaning not as mental content but as what inquiry stabilizes over time. His pragmatic maxim does not instruct us to act; it instructs us to attend to the conceivable practical effects of a concept—that is, to the habits, expectations, and patterns of response that would govern experience if the concept were true.

Here the latent Greek logic of pragmata reemerges in a transformed key. Meaning is not located in raw action, nor in static objects, nor in private ideas. It emerges where action has done enough work to produce a relatively stable situation—one that can be attended to, tested, and shared. In this sense, a pragma is neither a mere deed nor an inert thing, but action that has temporarily come to rest.

Richardson’s claim that pragmatism is about things should be understood in precisely this way. It is not a philological assertion that pragma literally meant “thing” in ancient Greek. Rather, it is a philosophical clarification of what Peirce’s pragmatism accomplishes. Action gives rise to situations; situations stabilize; attention lingers there; and meaning emerges. The “thing” is not prior to action, but neither is it reducible to action. It is what remains when action becomes intelligible.

Seen in this light, pragmatism does not represent a rejection of Greek thought but its delayed fulfillment. Herodotus’s concern with pragmata as the realities that outlast deeds, Aristotle’s emphasis on judgment within contingent affairs, and Peirce’s theory of meaning as the outcome of inquiry all participate in the same underlying logic. What Peirce provides—made possible by modern science, logic, and fallibilism—is the explicit recognition that meaning itself resides in the stabilized affairs of practice. Pragmatism, at its deepest level, is not a philosophy of action alone, but a philosophy of what action leaves behind.

Produced by Clint Warren - Aided by ChatGPT