Pragmatics deals with the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation, in particular the meaning that speakers and hearers attach to words, sentences, and entire utterances. It is a domain that lies between semantics on the one hand and grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy of language on the other hand. Its branches include the theory of how one and the same sentence can express different propositions or meanings in different contexts, the idiomatic meanings of words, the way that the use of a word depends on its context (e.g., ambiguity, indexicality), the theory of speech acts, and the theory of conversational implicature.

A person who is pragmatic is concerned less with what could or should be and more with what actually works. It is this concern for what actually works that primarily characterizes the philosophical pragmatism, or at least some forms of it, that have become popular in the United States.

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement based on the ideas of American philosopher John Dewey, who wrote several philosophical works, including Experience and Nature (1929). His idea was that we know things in terms of how they work in the real world and not by some abstract, theoretical criteria. The pragmatist approach is sometimes called radical empiricism, although most pragmatists disagree with the claim that this means that everything meaningful is just a matter of simple physical phenomena.

Some pragmatists are epistemological relativists and take this to be an essential facet of their philosophies; however, others think that this is a mistake and that relativism in any form is in fact detrimental. A related issue concerns the role of logic in pragmatism: most pragmatists are critical of formal logic’s pretension to ultimate validity and see it as just one tool among many for constructing arguments.

Among the most well-known philosophers associated with pragmatism are Richard Rorty, Charles Peirce, and Wittgenstein. More recently, James and John Dewey have been interpreted as pragmatists, with James expressing his philosophy in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1916).

In the classroom, teachers often use pragmatic activities for their students to help them learn how to make requests, discuss different ways to say a certain thing, and decide what response is appropriate for a given situation. For example, in the Forum article “Pragmatic Activities for the Speaking Classroom,” Joseph Siegel provides a number of scenarios and asks students to decide how they would respond. Another excellent pragmatic activity comes from Bach and Harnish, who present a study of the inferential process by which a speaker interprets an utterance by using contextual information. This kind of research falls into a category known as near-side pragmatics, which is closer to semantics and the philosophy of language than the traditional far-side pragmatics of classical linguistics.