Pragmatic is the term used to describe people who take a realistic approach to solving problems. They are pragmatic when they make decisions that are based on practical considerations, rather than abstract notions. Someone who is pragmatic doesn’t expect a four-year-old girl to receive a unicorn for her birthday because that isn’t practical or reasonable. The word comes from the Greek pragma, meaning “deed,” and it has historically described philosophers who focused on real-world application of ideas rather than on philosophical theories.
A related word, pragmatics, is the branch of philosophy that deals with how communicative actions get meaning based on a specific context. It’s also a broad area of study, including such things as eye-contact and body language, the way in which people reference themselves in conversations, and how children learn the meaning of words.
Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey viewed truth as something that works, and they sought to develop a theory of knowledge that is rooted in practical experience. This pragmatic view of knowledge led to the philosophy known as pragmatism, which influenced American culture, and is sometimes called Chicago pragmatism because many of the pragmatists were from Chicago, Illinois.
For the most part, mainstream analytic philosophers ignored pragmatism until the early 1980s. Then, with the publication of Quine’s article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” mainstream analytic philosophy began to embrace pragmatism. Since then, a number of scholars have developed a rich and diverse literature on pragmatics, with an ever-expanding set of applications in human communication.
One major problem is that, because pragmatics is so rich and interconnects with both linguistic and non-linguistic cognition, it has been difficult to achieve a tidy synthesis. In addition, the large literature on pragmatics has not been able to provide a clear line between innate pragmatic mechanisms and socially constructed pragmatic behaviors.
As the pragmatics research community moves forward, there is hope that some progress can be made in this area. For example, the recent special issue of the journal Pragmatics and Cognition suggests some valuable recommendations for the future. These include developing a deeper understanding of the cognitive presuppositions that underlie specific pragmatic phenomena, a toolkit of individual differences measures that follows best practices in the field, and a more theoretically motivated way to connect pragmatic mechanisms with semantic and cognitive ones. This can help to produce a more precise and useful definition of pragmatics, and move it closer to its original incarnation as a constructive, empirically grounded, and theoretically motivated philosophy. This will help to make pragmatics an important and relevant philosophical tradition in the 21st century. This is a good thing, because pragmatics can be used to improve how we communicate with each other and to enhance the ability of individuals who have impaired pragmatics as a result of a neurological or developmental disorder. The results of this effort will have far-reaching implications. Pragmatism has a lot to offer the philosophy world. It’s time to give it the recognition it deserves.
