Pragmatic is the study of language and how meaning is constructed. It also looks at what an utterance could mean in context and takes into account the implications of the speaker’s intended meaning as well as what a listener might take it to mean.
It is an approach that looks at direct practical consequences rather than simply relying on theories and it is a philosophical trend that determines the validity of concepts through their practical outcomes. Pragmatism can be applied to many different situations and it can be used in a positive way for choices and actions that are considered practical and reasonable, such as taking a pragmatic view of a situation before making a decision. It is a style that has gained popularity and acceptance as an alternative to other philosophical philosophies such as Analytic philosophy, which is more theoretical in nature.
The roots of pragmatism can be traced back to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who defined the philosophy, and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910). The American pragmatists were an influential group that shaped the development of philosophy in the United States and it presented a growing third alternative to both the analytic and continental philosophers at the time.
Early pragmatists were divided on a number of key issues, including whether the philosophy should conceive itself as a scientific philosophy with a monism about truth (Peirce) or a broad alethic pluralism (James and Dewey). Some pragmatists were also involved in various social and political movements of the time, such as progressive social reformers like George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963), and many were also active in the fields of mathematics, biology and anthropology.
More recently, a new wave of philosophers has developed what is sometimes called the ‘neo-pragmatist’ school of thought, which aims to revive and extend classical pragmatism by incorporating insights from other areas of contemporary thought. It has been influenced by developments in the sciences, particularly evolutionary theory, which first emerged at around the same time as the pragmatist philosophy was developing in the United States. The neo-pragmatists tend to support a naturalistic epistemology and reject a Cartesian foundation for logic.
There are several subfields of pragmatics, some of which include computational and theoretical pragmatics; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; clinical and experimental pragmatics; neuropragmatics; and the history of pragmatism. A further major subdiscipline of pragmatics is the theory of conversational implicature, a theory which focuses on the use of words and how they can be implied as meaning different things in different contexts. The pragmatics of reference resolution is another important area. This deals with how computers can be taught to resolve ambiguities in a sentence by using contextual information. It is an important component of natural language processing, which is a subfield of artificial intelligence. It is an area that has become increasingly relevant as the need for computers to be able to understand human communication and interaction increases.
