Pragmatic is the philosophical study of communication, meaning, and action. It is a’middle way’ between idealism and realism, and between traditional philosophy (emphasizing concepts like metaphysics and logic) and analytic philosophy (which prioritizes language and meaning).

Classical pragmatists, such as Peirce and Dewey, applied their ideas to a wide range of issues. These included educational philosophy and theory, public administration, political science, leadership studies, international relations, conflict resolution, and research methodology.

Contemporary neopragmatist philosophers have continued to build on the original pragmatist work, with an emphasis on the connection between thought and action. This has led to a significant influx of neopragmatist ideas into applied fields such as management and education.

The most well-known example of this is probably the concept of pragmatic fallacies, a list of common errors people make in argumentation and debate. However, the notion of pragmatics has also been applied to other disciplines, such as the study of communication and linguistics. Various theories of communication have been developed by pragmatists, including semiotics, rhetoric, and philosophy of language.

In general, pragmatics seeks to explain how we communicate and interpret language in a practical sense, while semantics tends to focus on the objects or ideas to which words or phrases refer, and syntax examines relationships among signs or symbols. Morris (1938) defines pragmatics as the “science of the relation of signs to their interpreters”; this is a rather broad definition, but it clearly distinguishes pragmatics from semantics and syntactics.

Another distinction is that pragmatics includes the notion of communicative intention, as formulated by Grice, which includes an explicit reference to the recipient of the message. This is not a common feature of semantics, and is part of the reason that pragmatism has often been considered a kind of epistemology, although it also has strong roots in the philosophy of action.

Despite the initial success of pragmatism, it has been criticized by some as a form of relativism or instrumentalism. The neopragmatists have responded to this accusation by insisting that they are not proposing a full-fledged theory of truth, but only a pragmatic approach to the concepts involved in discourse.

Nevertheless, many analytic philosophers have been uncomfortable with neopragmatism’s rejection of the notion of truth, and have sought to link neopragmatism with other philosophical traditions, such as utilitarianism. Other liberatory philosophical projects, such as feminism and ecology, have also looked to pragmatism for inspiration. Some contemporary pragmatists also have a strong psychological orientation and are interested in the nature of language as a cognitive process. These are sometimes described as ‘contextualists’ or’relevance theorists’.