Pragmatic is the study of language use that focuses on speakers, their communicative intentions and actions, and the context of those intentions. It is a sub-discipline of Philosophy, and a part of the wider field of Semantics. Pragmatics is distinguished from Semantics by its concern with the context of meaning-making rather than with reference, truth or grammar.
Pragmatism is an influential philosophical school of thought that has many applications in applied fields, including business, education, leadership studies, social science, international relations, and research methodology. Many of these fields have integrated pragmatism’s emphasis on the connection between thought and action in their fieldwork.
Those who espouse pragmatism believe that knowledge is a process of gaining and losing ground in the effort to understand a situation, that we cannot know things for certain, and that there are some truths that are simply beyond human grasp. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is congenial to the older skeptical tradition.
John Dewey is perhaps the most famous pragmatist philosopher, and his philosophies have been influential in educational thinking and practice. Other notable pragmatists include the sociologist Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett, who worked with Dewey at Hull House and was active in women’s rights activism.
A pragmatist is someone who makes decisions with practical considerations in mind, rather than theoretical or ideological ideals. They compromise between their theoretically ideal outcome and the useful, practical actions they can take to improve a situation. This is a very common trait in the workplace, and a central feature of pragmatics as an applied philosophy.
The study of pragmatics can be divided into two broad sections: critical and constructive. Critical pragmatists believe that traditional semantics and grammatical rules do not adequately explain the nature of pragmatic meaning in any language or discourse context, and that we must look to other factors for the explanation of these meanings. This is a more ecumenical approach to pragmatics, and differs from the more narrowly defined view of pragmatics favored by constructive pragmatists.
Both approaches to pragmatics have important applications in applied fields, such as business, law, psychology, and medicine. In these fields, pragmatics seeks to address the problems of uncertainty in decision-making, how people communicate in a multilingual society, and how to teach language skills to learners of different ages. One of the most important applications is in computational pragmatics, which aims to develop computer systems that better approximate natural human language and information processing abilities. For example, the problem of reference resolution, which is how computers recognize when a word such as u refers to the same object as another word, is addressed by this branch of pragmatics. Another related computational pragmatic problem is the problem of lexical extension, which is how to incorporate new words into a dictionary. A third area of pragmatics is sociocultural pragmatics, which examines how culture influences communication in various discourse contexts.
