Pragmatism is a philosophic school generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim.  It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James and John Dewey.  Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as 'pragmatists' consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth.  Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention from the 1950s on, because of a new school of philosophers who put forth a revised pragmatism that criticized the logical positivism that had dominated philosophy in the United States and Britain since the 1930s, notably in the work of analytic philosophers like W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars.  Their naturalized epistemology was further developed and widely publicized by Richard Rorty, whose later work grew closer to continental philosophy and is often considered relativistic.  Contemporary pragmatism is still divided between those thinkers who work strictly within the analytic tradition, a more relativistic strand in the wake of Rorty and lastly neoclassical pragmatists like Susan Haack who stay closer to the work of Peirce, James and Dewey.

Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers, some of them radically opposed to one another.  The name 'neopragmatist' signifies that the thinkers in question incorporate important insights of, and yet significantly diverge from, the classical pragmatists. This divergence may occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in actual conceptual formation.