Pragmatic is the ability to remain calm in a crisis and make practical calls based on real-world circumstances. This is distinct from dogmatic, which often describes a person who is unyielding and doesn’t listen to other viewpoints.
The philosophical approach to pragmatics can be categorized in two different ways: those who believe that semantics is basically autonomous, with very little ‘pragmatic intrusion’ and those who think the opposite: that there are no ‘free’ semantics and all meaning is influenced by context. The latter are sometimes called ‘contextualists’ or ‘pragmatic philosophers.’
A person who is pragmatic is able to assess their situation and determine the best course of action to take, regardless of whether it may be controversial or inconvenient. They are able to see the big picture and know what is at stake, but they also take one step at a time and don’t get bogged down with their emotions or ideals.
Historically, the philosophical approach to pragmatics has been known as American pragmatism because many of its main proponents were from America. However, today there is a broad range of pragmatists across the globe who work in a wide variety of fields. The common denominator is that they are interested in the ‘pragmatics’ of their discipline and they are trying to find how best to use the methods of pragmatism in the context of that field.
Pragmatists are characterized by their rejection of the idea that there is any ‘absolute’ truth or validity to human knowledge. They instead view all knowledge as flawed and therefore limited. They are a form of fallibilism that is not the same as scientific skepticism, which requires a global skeptical attitude and rejects science as a source of truth.
A pragmatist’s work might be found in areas such as philosophy, logic, ethics, sociology, theology and even mathematics. They might focus on a specific application of pragmatism, such as pragmatist philosophy of religion, or they might be working in an area that is inspired by pragmatism, such as applied philosophy or philosophical methodology.
The various theorists of pragmatics divide their work into ‘near-side’ and ‘far-side pragmatics.’ Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of a number of facts that are relevant to the determination of what an utterance means, including what the illocutionary forces that impose constraints on meaning in speech acts are. Far-side pragmatics, on the other hand, deals with what happens after speech acts are uttered and what implications these imply.
The ‘Classic Period’ of pragmatism ended with the emergence of logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy and the Chicago School, which all share an interest in a form of pragmatics that includes the notion of communicative intention (called M-intention by Grice) as a guiding principle for understanding utterance interpretation. This is sometimes referred to as natural language pragmatics or the Chicago School of pragmatics. More recently, a number of researchers have taken an empirical psychological approach to pragmatics that emphasizes the role of lexical semantics and social cognition in determining what an utterance actually means.
