Pragmatic is the state or quality of dealing sensibly and realistically in a practical way. Someone who is pragmatic is able to weigh up all the options and make decisions based on real life situations and facts rather than a preconceived idea or theory of how things should be done. They are able to see the big picture and understand that their actions will affect other people as well as themselves. This is a more moral and ethical approach to decision making.
There are many different kinds of pragmatics: computational and theoretical; game-theoretic, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural, interlinguistic and even historical pragmatics. However, they all share a common ground in being concerned with the ways that we communicate our intentions to others. Victoria Fromkin, who studied at University of Bristol and worked for the BBC before completing her PhD in pragmatics, defines pragmatics as ‘the study of how context influences meaning-making in natural language communication’. For example, it looks at the ways that a computer system processes information about a sentence and how it relates to other words in the same conversation. It also considers how the computer system determines whether an object is the same as another, or not. This process is known as reference resolution and is one of the most important tasks of computational pragmatics.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is usually regarded as the founder of pragmatism. He defined it in a series of lectures on logic, and William James (1842-1910) elaborated on his ideas at Radcliffe/Harvard. Josiah Royce (1855-1916), who was initially allied with absolute idealism, became a significant pragmatist and developed his own interpretation of Peirce’s concept of signs and community of inquirers.
More recently, philosophers such as Habermas have used pragmatism to develop discourse ethics, which offers an alternative to the distortions of power and ideology that are often at play in social and political processes. He has built on pragmatism’s theory of truth to create a concept of communicative action free of these distortions, and this has led him to influence the disciplines of philosophy, ethics, politics, history of science, sociology, law, art and religion – all areas that Dewey himself would have appreciated (Baker 2005).
The word pragmatic is related to the Latin word for ‘practical’ and comes from the verb praegere, meaning “to try out.” People who are pragmatic tend to be interested in practical solutions to problems. They tend to focus on efficiency, and they prefer a direct and objective approach. These characteristics can lead to a lack of creativity and originality, but they can also help them achieve goals more quickly.
A person who is pragmatic can deal with difficult situations in a controlled manner and avoid unnecessary emotional distress. They are able to take control of the situation and manage their feelings by thinking about how they can best accomplish their goals. This is a positive trait, but it can be at odds with risk taking and being a visionary.
