pragmatism

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Philosophy A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.
• noun A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Pragmatical character or conduct; officiousness; busy impertinence.
• noun In history, same as pragmatic method. See pragmatic, a.
• noun In philosophy, a method of thought, a general movement or tendency of thought, and a specific school, in which stress is placed upon practical consequences and practical values as standards for explicating philosophic conceptions and as tests for determining their value and, especially, their truth.
• noun A theory of the nature of truth, namely, that the correspondence between fact and idea which constitutes truth consists in the power of the idea in question to work satisfactorily, or to produce the results intended by it.
• noun A metaphysical theory regarding the nature of reality, namely that it is still in process of making, and that human ideas and efforts play a fundamental rôle in its making: the equivalent of humanism as a metaphysical term.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The quality or state of being pragmatic; in literature, the pragmatic, or philosophical, method.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The pursuit of practicality over aesthetic qualities; a concentration on facts rather than emotions or ideals.
• noun politics The theory that political problems should be met with practical solutions rather than ideological ones.
• noun philosophy The idea that beliefs are identified with the actions of a believer, and the truth of beliefs with success of those actions in securing a believer's goals; the doctrine that ideas must be looked at in terms of their practical effects and consequences.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun (philosophy) the doctrine that practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge and meaning and value
• noun the attribute of accepting the facts of life and favoring practicality and literal truth