A person who is pragmatic is practical, and is concerned with results and consequences. People who are not pragmatic may be overly concerned with theory and not as focused on what can actually be done. In the realm of philosophy, pragmatism refers to a philosophical movement that emphasizes practical considerations in the determination of meaning, truth or value.
The word pragmatic is often contrasted with idealistic, as in “we need a politician who’s pragmatic and can get things done in the real world” versus “someone who’s strictly an idealist and won’t compromise.” Being pragmatic means dealing with issues based on the realities of the situation at hand rather than on the best theoretical outcome. In business, a pragmatic approach to solving problems is usually more successful than one that’s more theoretical.
Pragmatic is also a term used to describe the study of how context influences the meaning and interpretation of an utterance. The defining concept of pragmatics is that there are different meanings of an expression depending on the specific context in which it’s uttered, and that these meanings are determined not by some sort of hidden indexical that can be deduced from the grammatical structure of the sentence, but rather by the fact that some particular linguistic features are relevant to the situation at hand.
Various pragmatic theorists have developed different models of the process of determining these contextual meanings, but in general they can be divided into two groups: those who focus on what is conveyed beyond the utterance itself (so-called far-side pragmatics), and those who concentrate on the nature of the utterance itself and its interaction with grammar (near-side pragmatics). The latter group is generally considered to include those theorists who adhere to Grice’s notion of communicative intention, along with those who hold various forms of relevance theory.
The two groups are further divided by their view of how much pragmatics ‘intrudes’ into semantics, and the degree to which semantics is autonomous. ‘Literalists’ hold that semantics is basically independent of pragmatic factors, while ‘hidden-indexicalists’ are inclined to allow pragmatically determined content to enter a proposition at some level of linguistic description, even in the absence of any particular context-sensitive expression.
In addition to semantic and grammatical analysis, pragmatics also considers other aspects of language, including its sound, meaning in context, the use of metaphor and other figures of speech, and its role in communication. It is sometimes viewed as a subfield of semantics, along with syntax and the metalanguage of writing systems. However, it is more commonly viewed as a separate field of study in its own right, and has been the subject of its own journal since 1986. The International Pragmatics Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field.
