A person who is pragmatic is concerned more with what is, than what should be or could be. They focus on practical matters of fact, such as the results and consequences of actions, rather than on philosophical issues like truth or beauty. The word Pragmatic derives from a Latin adjective meaning “to be suitable, pertinent, or appropriate.” It is used to describe a particular type of behavior or a way of thinking or acting.
The term pragmatics has been applied to a wide variety of fields, ranging from philosophy and linguistics to ethics and psychology. The field has evolved with changes in the use of language, including social change and the emergence of new communication technologies. The discipline is influenced by many theories, but one important principle of pragmatics is that there are a number of ways an utterance can be interpreted. This is why the field of pragmatics has many different strands and subfields.
Many philosophers see pragmatics as a separate branch of philosophy, distinct from semantics and syntax. They distinguish pragmatics from semantics by focusing on the relationships between signs and their users. Morris, for example, defines pragmatics as the relation of signs to objects which they may or do denote. Semantics, on the other hand, deals with the logical relations between sign and object.
In linguistics, the discipline of pragmatics encompasses various theories of utterance interpretation and context-dependence. These include Speech Act Theory, the theory of illocutionary acts pioneered by J.L. Austin, and the theory of conversational implicature developed by John Searle. Another approach to pragmatics is that of Gricean pragmatics, which centers on a notion of communicative intention whose fulfillment consists in being recognized by the addressee.
A basic concept in pragmatics is that there are two kinds of facts about an utterance: the pragmatic facts that are already encoded in the utterance itself, and the extra-linguistic circumstances surrounding its production and reception. Pragmatics therefore concerns the study of a range of phenomena, including resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns. It also includes the study of presupposition.
Computational pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that involves the application of computational methods to the problem of understanding human languages. The goal of this area is to develop computer systems that more accurately reflect the natural ability of humans to communicate their intentions to computers, using contextual information to reduce ambiguity and to better match human abilities. The process is known as natural language processing (or NLP). The specifics of computational pragmatics involve identifying how to best translate human languages into computer programs, and what kind of contextual knowledge is needed for a program to understand the ambiguities and inferences involved in human communication.
