Pragmatic is a word that means “contextual meaning.” People who are pragmatic take social, cultural and situational factors into account when using language. They know how to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines in conversation and navigate ambiguity in context. It’s also what allows us to know that someone really meant something else when they say, “I put my hands on Elwood.”
A person who is pragmatic doesn’t get hung up on big-picture ideals and emotions. Instead, they make decisions based on real-world circumstances and results. Pragmatic people tend to be able to solve problems quickly and effectively because they’re not stuck on a particular moral or philosophical principle.
Although pragmatism started as just a criterion of meaning, it has evolved into an entire philosophy with broad implications for the field of epistemology. It is sometimes considered a form of rationalism because it believes that all knowledge is acquired through experience and experimentation. However, it also advocates a strong reliance on intuition, and rejects the idea that there is any one definitive way to prove a theory.
The philosophical roots of pragmatism lie in the work of philosophers William James and John Dewey. James believed that a person only truly understood something by experiencing it. Dewey argued that a belief only has value when it is useful in making decisions. This concept is often applied to the teaching of English, as it is believed that students will only learn vocabulary and grammar by practicing it in real-life situations.
Another major philosophical aspect of pragmatism is the role of a person’s beliefs in determining reality. It is widely debated whether or not a belief actually represents the world around them. Specifically, whether or not the struggle of intelligent organisms to deal with their surroundings qualifies as an authentic mode of knowing. The concept is sometimes referred to as the “criterion of usefulness.”
Pragmatics has been an area of interest for psycholinguists for a long time. However, the experimental literature on the topic has been highly variable. This is partly due to the ongoing problem with reproducibility in the psychological sciences — what’s been dubbed the replication crisis.
Many teachers incorporate pragmatic instruction into their classrooms, particularly in English language classes. For example, a teacher may have students practice greetings in different cultures or in different ways that they might apologize in each culture. Typically, pragmatic instruction is tied to content in the textbook. For example, if a teacher is going over the textbook lesson on apologies, she might add a lesson in how to be pragmatic in a specific cultural context. Alternatively, the lesson might be centered on an upcoming unit on language functions. The Gricean Maxims are the four general pragmatic rules that seem to hold in most contexts and languages. These include being brief, being honest, being relevant and being courteous. The more a person follows these maxims, the more successful they will be in their endeavors.
