Pragmatic is an approach to the study of language and human communication. It looks at the interaction between speakers and the way they construct meaning from ambiguous utterances. In other words, pragmatism is about making choices that work in the real world, rather than idealistic ones that may never be realized. It is an alternative to the traditional philosophy of language and its focus on reference, truth, or grammar.

Different theorists have focused on different aspects of pragmatics. For example, Bach and Harnish distinguished between what they called “near-side” pragmatics and “far-side” pragmatics. Their idea was that the utterances of language are inherently ambiguous, and pragmatic knowledge helps to disambiguate these ambiguities. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts relevant to determining what is said; far-side pragmatics concerns what speech acts are performed in or by saying what is said, what implicatures are generated by the utterance, etc.

Another area of pragmatics is a theory of discourse. The concept of discourse was influenced by the pragmatist philosopher Charles Morris, who wrote that pragmatics focuses on the relationship between signs and their interpreters, while semantics focuses on the actual objects that a word denotes and syntax (or syntactics) examines relationships among the parts of an expression.

A third area of pragmatics is the study of communication between animals and human beings, particularly in the form of naturalistic pragmatics. This approach is often considered a subset of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, but it also touches on biology and physics. This discipline is important because it seeks to analyze the interactions between humans and non-human creatures in terms of what actually works.

People who are described as pragmatic tend to take a realistic view of the world around them, and they usually weigh their options and courses of action before they act. They often focus on reducing harm, which is important for everyone. They also make decisions that are best for the group, or for society as a whole.

Pragmatic thinking is used in business, law, and many other areas of life. It is often based on the premise that, in the end, you cannot please everybody all the time, so you should try to achieve what you can do well and let the rest slide.

In everyday use, pragmatic is usually a positive term that means being fair and honest. For example, if you go out with friends and have drinks, the pragmatic thing to do is to split the bill evenly rather than argue over who had more beers or a larger portion of the meal.

The political term pragmatic is similarly applied to the art of government, which aims to balance policies with the United States against those with other regional powers such as Russia or China. This is known as pragmatic diplomacy. It is also an important element of international politics, where the goal is to have as stable a region as possible in order to reduce conflict.