Pragmatic is a word that describes a person or an approach that is based on practicality, realism and logical thinking. It often emphasizes the consideration of realistic options and courses of action, and it is generally viewed as a good thing.
The term pragmatic is also used to refer to the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism, a school of philosophy that stresses practical consequences as constituting the essential criterion for determining meaning, truth or value. This pragmatic approach to philosophical problems contrasts with other schools of thought that place a greater emphasis on the importance of principles and ideals.
It’s no wonder that the word pragmatic is so closely associated with realism and practicality—both of which are central to a child’s development, growth and learning. Pragmatic speech and language skills are important for children to develop in order to communicate effectively with others. If your child’s pragmatic language skills are not developing normally, you should speak to their doctor or a speech therapist to help them improve this area of communication.
As the name implies, pragmatics is concerned with the way in which people use language to convey meaning, and how different contexts influence this. In particular, it examines the ways in which one sentence may be interpreted to mean different things, depending on the context of the utterance, the speaker’s intentions and their previous experience.
The pragmatists of the classical era were particularly strong in arguing that what is true and what is valuable are pragmatically determined, not based on metaphysical ideas about truth or the intrinsic nature of things, but on their utility for human beings. This idea has continued to be a powerful force in modern philosophy, with many contemporary philosophers developing rich pragmatist approaches to their work in both the analytic and continental traditions.
In the case of linguistic pragmatics, there are two broad streams within the field: those who see it as a philosophical project, much in the Gricean vein; and those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar. Some of the most interesting developments in pragmatics, however, are on the far side of this boundary; those that focus on the role of contextual information in the determination of the meaning of a sentence. These branches of pragmatics are sometimes called ‘near-side pragmatics’ and include such topics as the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and the theory of conversational implicature.
A number of philosophers have developed a wide range of other pragmatic concepts that are not easily categorised as either near-side or far-side pragmatics. For example, Brandom’s concept of a ‘pragmatic intrusion’ (Brandom 2008) offers a powerful account of how semantic and pragmatic concepts can be combined into a single framework for the study of utterance interpretation, and has been widely influential in recent philosophy. This sort of pragmatist philosophy is also evident in the work of other researchers such as Bach and Harnish, who have constructed an account of utterance interpretation as an inferential process that draws on both semantics and a form of pragmatic theory of relevance (Bach and Harnish 2003). This sort of pragmatic philosophy also informs some of the research being carried out by cognitive psychologists on naturalistic pragmatics.
