Pragmatic is a philosophy that focuses on the practical application of ideas to real-world situations. It is often associated with the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (who coined the term “pragmatism”), William James and John Dewey. In general, pragmatists argue that many philosophical topics such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, and belief are best viewed not as unchanging metaphysical truths but rather as tools for solving problems and making progress.

Generally, a pragmatic approach is more effective in the long run than an idealistic one, as it helps to overcome obstacles that could otherwise impede progress. The pragmatic perspective is therefore attractive to business leaders and other people who are looking for a way to achieve their goals in the most efficient manner possible.

A pragmatic approach is also often preferable in the context of politics, as it can help to deal with the challenges that can arise from entrenched political positions and views. This is because pragmatic approaches are more likely to be able to address and resolve the conflicting interests of different parties, whereas idealistic approaches can be difficult to implement in practice.

The philosophies associated with pragmatics are diverse, and there are various approaches to the subject that have developed over time. For example, there is a broad range of disciplines and methodologies that have contributed to the development of pragmatics, including linguistics, semantics, ethics, law, philosophy, and sociology.

For a philosophical view on pragmatics, the basic idea is that the meaning of an utterance depends upon its use in context. This is a commonplace intuition, and one that was highlighted by Charles Grice in his pragmatic maxim: “Meaning does not reside in the logical or grammatical structure of a sentence, but in the way the meaning of a message is conveyed.”

Semantics tends to focus on the literal or truth-conditional meaning of a word or phrase, while syntax focuses on the relationships between signs or symbols. Pragmatics, as the study of how words are used to communicate, falls between these two, and can be seen as a meta-linguistic discipline.

Contemporary philosophical pragmatic theories are often classified by whether they consider that the study of pragmatics should mainly be focused on what is said or how it is said. Relevance theory is perhaps the main contributor to the latter view, and it has largely defined pragmatics as the study of the processes by which hearers understand what speakers mean by their utterances. This is sometimes referred to as far-side pragmatics.

Other pragmatists, however, have a broader conception of pragmatics and are more interested in the whole context within which the utterance is delivered. This is a near-side pragmatics and can be seen in the work of Bach and Harnish, for instance, who develop a model of utterance interpretation as an inferential process that includes both far- and near-side elements. It is also a view that is adopted by some of the authors who work on discourse analysis, particularly those who use probabilistic and Bayesian methods to analyze pragmatic phenomena.