Pragmatic is a word used in a positive way to praise choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable. It’s often used in the context of political positions or actions. People who are pragmatic tend to focus more on results and consequences than on ideals. In fact, the opposite of pragmatic is idealistic. People who are very idealistic tend to be more focused on what could be, or should be, and less concerned with what is actually happening in the world around them.
The field of Pragmatics tries to answer the question, “What does a speaker mean when they say something? How does the particular situation and the listener’s culture affect that meaning?” It also seeks to understand the interaction between a speaker’s intentions, their beliefs and values, and the context in which they are communicating.
In a classroom, lessons on pragmatics are usually related to language functions such as greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, and apologies. The lessons might also be related to the students’ home and target cultures. For example, if the class is going over textbook content concerning apologies, the teacher might add lessons on how to apologize in both the students’ home language and their target language.
Although pragmatism has its roots in philosophy, it is often viewed as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation. For this reason, it is considered a sub-field of psycholinguistics. In the 1970s, psychologists and psycholinguists began to explore the pragmatic aspects of speech and language. This was a departure from the traditional emphasis in these fields on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. Some critics of pragmatics claimed that it was a wastebasket discipline for linguistics, but the field has survived and made its mark.
Besides studying the effects of culture and context on the meaning of words, some researchers also examine the relationship between pragmatics and other research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, linguistic anthropology, media studies, and psychology. The journal Pragmatics also encourages contributions that cross disciplinary boundaries and bring together different perspectives on the same topics.
Pragmatism is often seen as a form of naturalism, although some pragmatists reject this notion and consider it a tenet of philosophical idealism. Unlike traditional idealism, pragmatism does not assert that any particular truths or concepts are true because they have not been verified in the real world. This philosophical viewpoint is similar to the utilitarian view of ethics that states that what works in the real world should be rewarded and what does not work in the real world should be punished. Although pragmatism is not as widespread as theology or philosophy, it has been adopted by some major companies, including IBM. The company is a longtime supporter of the annual Pragmatics Conference, which aims to promote interdisciplinary interaction between pragmaticist philosophers and researchers in other disciplines. The conference is held in various locations each year and includes lectures, workshops, and social events.
