Pragmatic is an adjective used to describe choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable. It is often used to describe political positions or actions. The word pragmatic is derived from the Latin pragma, meaning “practice.” People who are considered pragmatic are seen as taking into account all the relevant information before making a decision. They also consider the consequences of their decisions for themselves and others. In a broader sense, the word pragmatic can be applied to any situation where there are multiple ways of solving a problem or accomplishing a task.
Philosophers have explored many topics through the lens of pragmatism. Some of these topics include epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of language. This month’s Teacher’s Corner takes a look at pragmatics, an important component of the English language classroom that is frequently overlooked. It includes resources and ideas for teaching pragmatics and building students’ pragmatic competence.
A central concept in pragmatism is that truth is something that a person must figure out for himself or herself through experience. This is in contrast to more traditional theories of truth that are based on abstract concepts, such as the correspondence between an idea and its representation in a language.
While the classical pragmatists developed the philosophy of pragmatism around their work in epistemology, they also contributed to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In particular, their efforts to close the gap between theory and practice lent themselves well to exploring issues in social science. For example, DuBois was involved in the Philadelphia College Settlement in an effort to understand the problems of black people in the city.
The pragmatics that pragmatists are known for addressing include the way in which people use language, how they learn, and the role of context in understanding meaning. These aspects of pragmatics are the focus of various subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, and natural language processing. The field of computational pragmatics, for example, is concerned with how to communicate a speaker’s intentions to computers so that they can more accurately process input.
For instance, a computational pragmatics approach would consider things like reference resolution (how to determine whether a word means the same as another), which is an essential step in helping computers better understand human language and information. Another aspect of computational pragmatics is how to help computers make predictions about the possible outcomes of a specific situation, a process called inference. In this case, the computer might use information about previous experiences to predict what will be most useful for completing a given task. The implication of these types of predictions is that the resulting system can be more intelligent than systems that are not augmented with this type of knowledge.
