Pragmatic is the study of how context contributes to the meaning of a word or phrase. It’s an important branch of linguistics because language is often ambiguous and people don’t always say what they mean. Pragmatic knowledge allows us to do things like politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation, and navigate ambiguity in context.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin praxe, which means “practice”. It is used to describe a way of living that focuses on results and consequences. Pragmatic thinking is contrasted with idealism, which is a form of philosophy that emphasizes ideals and tries to achieve them in practice.
There are many different theories of pragmatics. Some approaches focus on how words work in context, while others look at the broader implications of a communication. It’s also possible to view pragmatics as a subfield of linguistics, and in particular, of semantics, which studies the relationship between sentences and the propositions they express. However, this is misleading because semantics tends to be ‘near-side’ of pragmatics, dealing with the significance conventionally or literally attached to words and phrases, while near-side pragmatics deals with aspects of contextuality that aren’t a consequence of the word’s grammatical form but rather its use within a given utterance.
Some philosophers have made a clear distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and others have attempted to bridge the gap. One popular approach is to view semantics as a subset of pragmatics, looking at the meaning of words in context and the rules that determine those meanings. A more precise definition of pragmatics is a theory of linguistic meaning that combines a theory of sentence structure with a theory of the context in which those sentences are used.
A central part of pragmatism is the understanding that knowledge of the world is inseparable from our agency within it. This gives rise to an original a posteriori epistemology and many other rich ideas – such as the belief that philosophy should be applied to questions of social progress (an idea first articulated by John Dewey) and the notion that a truth is more than just what is true in a given context.
More generally, pragmatism is characterized by its rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body, and analytic/synthetic. It also rejects skepticism and embraces fallibilism, and it seeks to understand human nature, the world around us, and our experience of it as a complex interaction of multiple levels of information. A key feature of pragmatism is the recognition that some problems cannot be solved, but it provides an alternative to nihilism and other forms of pessimism by encouraging individuals to adopt a positive attitude towards their situation. This positive approach is sometimes referred to as practical ethics. It is a way of life that has found wide acceptance in the business world and among parents trying to raise children. It is also a philosophical tradition that has inspired a range of innovative social movements, such as feminism and community activism.