What we meet through action and its consequences. The world answers back.
Ideas are tools, tested in use. Inquiry starts from a real problem, and making is a way of knowing.
What works, and what difference does it make?
Key thinkers: John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce
The longer story
Pragmatism judges ideas by what they let us do. For Peirce, James and Dewey, thinking is a response to a real difficulty, and knowledge is what we have when a problem has been worked through in practice. Truth is not a mirror of the world; it is what holds up when tested in use.
This makes it a natural home for practice research and design research. Dewey's Art as Experience treats making and perceiving as forms of inquiry, and Schön's reflective practitioner comes straight from this tradition. It is also the usual justification for mixing methods: use whatever answers the question. The risk is using "it works" to avoid asking for whom.