A pragmatic person deals with situations in a practical, results-oriented way that fits the actual circumstances. A pragmatist does not follow any fixed theories or ideas.

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that concerns the ways in which people use language to convey their intentions and what meaning their utterances have in specific contexts. It is a broad and complex field, encompassing many different theories and techniques. Some of these are philosophical, such as the one advanced by Grice, while others focus on the interplay between semantics and grammar. There is also computational pragmatics, which involves the computer science of natural language processing and aims to better understand how computers process speech and information.

Another approach to pragmatics is cognitive, based on the theory that there are a set of general-purpose “intentional states” that all humans use, and that these state how they will proceed in a given social situation. Cognitive pragmatics is closely related to the theory of interactional semantics, which developed in the early 1970s. This theory, in turn, is the basis of the field of conversation analysis.

The pragmatics of children’s language development is an area of particular interest, because it relates to how they learn to interact with their peers. The pragmatic skills that children develop as they grow up depend on their social environment and the way they are taught. Children who have trouble socializing with their peers often have pragmatic language difficulties. The problem is that it is hard to test pragmatic language skills because they are a product of the social situation, not simply of the child’s knowledge of what to say or how to behave.

Another philosophical approach to pragmatics is based on radical empiricism, as advocated by John Dewey and Richard Rorty. This school of thought emphasizes the value and importance of experience and nature as opposed to theoretical concepts such as truth, beauty, and goodness. It rejects the idea that science automatically degrades all things that are meaningful into merely physical phenomena. This school of thought is sometimes called pragmatic naturalism or pragmatist philosophy.