Pragmatic is a philosophical term that refers to the practical and logical nature of certain choices, ideas, and actions. It is often contrasted with idealistic, but in most cases, pragmatic is seen as a positive word that describes people and things that are rooted in reality and reasonable.
A key concept in pragmatism is the idea that an utterance’s meaning is not determined solely by the conventional or literal meanings of its words. Instead, a number of other factors are used to determine what an utterance means, including the context, audience, and speaker’s intentions. A key aspect of pragmatics is the use of demonstrative adjectives, such as these, that, and there. These adjectives are used to show where an object or action is located in the context of a sentence, and they are completely reliant on context in order to make sense.
The philosophical tradition of pragmatism is rooted in the work of American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. This first generation of pragmatists focused largely on theorising inquiry, meaning, and truth, although James subsequently turned his attention to social questions (e.g. the philosophy of religion). Later, a second generation of pragmatists turned their focus largely to politics and education, under the influence of John Dewey and his friend Jane Addams, who founded the first social work profession as an expression of pragmatism.
Today, pragmatism continues to offer a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ traditions worldwide. It has been embraced to varying degrees by the likes of Wittgenstein, Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, and F.P. Ramsey, but has not found a permanent home within mainstream analytic philosophy.
Pragmatics is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the pragmatics of language. It seeks to explain how we manage to communicate with one another through the medium of language. This includes the way in which we form sentences, how our grammatical rules work, and what meanings our utterances have. It also deals with issues such as ambiguity and vagueness, reference, indexicals and demonstratives, and anaphors, as well as at least some issues involving presupposition.
‘Critical Pragmatics’ is the name given to a recent development in pragmatics which attempts to replace the notion of an utterance’s meaning with two concepts, the’reflexive content’ and the’referential content’. The former reflects the conventional or literal meaning of the utterance, and the latter refers to a set of conditions on the utterance beyond its semantically-determined content, such as those governing resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, and the occurrence and nature of indexicals and demonstratives.