Pragmatic — pronounced “prag-MAY” — is the contextual meaning of language. It takes into consideration social, cultural, and situational factors that influence communication beyond a literal sense. It’s what allows you to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines in conversation, or negotiate turn-taking norms. Language is inherently ambiguous and people don’t always say what they mean, so pragmatics is all about disambiguation in context.
Pragmatism is a philosophical school of thought that originated with American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a theory of knowledge and action that emphasizes practical results over theoretical ideals. It advocates that you should take into account the reality of a given situation and what you can realistically accomplish in a specific course of action. This is in contrast to an idealist who will insist on sticking to his or her highest principles and values, regardless of the outcome.
Applied pragmatics involves utilizing technology to help solve real-world problems. A national hospital, for example, partnered with Pragmatic Works to integrate and optimize multiple enormous streams of data to improve operating room scheduling predictions and planning. This helped reduce wasted time, which means more care for patients and revenue for the hospital.
Another way in which pragmatics is used is in the field of law enforcement and legal reasoning. For example, a detective might use pragmatics when trying to determine whether a suspect’s statements are incriminating. This includes analyzing a suspect’s tone of voice, body posture, and facial expressions. It also considers the context in which the statement was made, including past actions and current emotions.
One of the central concepts in pragmatics is the notion of communicative intention, coined by Paul Grice. Communicative intention refers to the overall goal of an utterance, which is that it will be understood and appreciated by the speaker’s addressee. In his work, Grice developed what are now known as the Gricean Maxims, four general pragmatic rules that are regarded as the foundation of modern pragmatics.
Some scholars, such as Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward, see pragmatics largely as a philosophical project that intersects with grammar and others, such as Kepa Korta and John Perry, view it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation. In the latter case, they would split pragmatics into two distinct domains: those parts that are closer to semantics and those that are farther away from semantics. However, this distinction is not clear cut and the boundaries between the two are somewhat porous.
