Pragmatic is a word used to describe people, actions, and plans that are sensible or practical. It is often contrasted with idealistic, in that an idealist tends to stick by their principles regardless of the consequences, and that pragmatic people are willing to compromise or focus on realistic options.
Pragmatism is a philosophical school of thought that stresses the connection between thinking and acting. It is applied in fields as diverse as public administration, leadership studies, political science, international relations, and research methodology. Pragmatism has also been called a “methodological epistemology” because it emphasizes that beliefs become true or false only when they help us make sense of the world around us, and that the process of knowing is an ongoing struggle that depends on our interactions with the environment.
In the early 20th century, philosophers such as John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce developed pragmatism into a full-fledged philosophy of inquiry. Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics are incredibly diverse and there is no single accepted view. But general tendencies can be identified: those who consider pragmatics, largely in the Gricean vein, to be a philosophy of language; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who regard it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.
A common feature of pragmatics is that it focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions and how these interact with the linguistic context. This approach differs from other linguistic theories, such as semantics, which concentrate on the literal meaning of expressions, and syntax, which looks at the relationships between words.
Moreover, pragmatics has come to embrace the notion of “meaning-as-use” as central, rather than simply truth or reference. This is reflected in the rise of various pragmatic models, including Relevance Theory, which sees meaning as being the result of an underlying pragmatic goal; and pragmatic interpretation, which sees a speaker’s purpose and their interaction with a listener as influencing the resulting meaning of an utterance.
Another aspect of pragmatics is its emphasis on the need for a principled basis for knowledge and action, and this leads to a form of empiricism that is sometimes referred to as “pragmatic realism.” This posits that there is some kind of objective reality that can be discerned by our interactions with the world, and which we can learn about through observing our own experiences. It is an alternative to the more traditional, naturalist metaphilosophy of logical positivism.
Pragmatism is also associated with a variety of methods and theories in disciplines such as cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, psycholinguistics, and sociology. Some of these have adopted the core elements of pragmatism, while others have incorporated pragmatism as one of several possible perspectives on their own work. For example, there are pragmatic theories of motivation, decision making, and the role of language in learning and cognition. Some of these have even been employed in the field of education.
