Pragmatic is an adjective that describes a person who pays attention to what is practical and reasonable. It can also be used to describe a particular style of philosophical thought. Pragmatic philosophy stresses the importance of practical results and consequences over metaphysical concepts and epistemological disputes. In its most down-to-earth form, pragmatism is a philosophy of results and consequences that seeks to settle (or at least refocus) arguments by asking, “What concrete practical difference would it make if this theory were true and its rival were false?”
Pragmatists are generally described as middle-of-the-road thinkers who try to find an acceptable solution to an issue. The term pragmatic is often used in reference to political positions or actions, and it can be a positive thing, implying that the speaker’s position takes arguments from all sides into account. It can also be negative, describing someone who is unwilling to take the time or effort to consider other points of view.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin prassein or prattein, meaning “to do, to act, to perform” or, in the case of an action, “to manage”. It has been used as an adjective since 1610s, and in English, pragmatic was used for the first time in the 1850s. The linguistics sense, from the mid-1900s, is related to the study of how people use language and how physical or social contexts affect meaning in spoken or written communication.
Linguists distinguish pragmatics from semantics, syntax, and semiotics by stressing its focus on nonliteral expressions and the way they are used in a physical or social context. While semantics focuses on rule systems that determine the literal linguistic meanings of words and phrases, syntax explains how words combine to create sentences with specific meanings, and semiotics studies the meanings of signs and symbols. Pragmatics tries to answer questions like, What does it mean when someone says “I have two sons”? and How do people know what others mean when they say things like, “You’re not my type.”
Some linguists divide pragmatics into subfields such as conversational pragmatics, politeness, and textual pragmatics. Others argue that the term pragmatics encompasses all of these aspects, including the notion of a communicative intention—called M(aning)-intention by Grice—that allows for a certain degree of ambiguity in the interpretation of an utterance.
The concept of pragmatics is a central theme in a broad range of academic fields, from psychology to philosophy and anthropology. Some philosophers see pragmatics as a philosophical project in the tradition of William James and Charles S. Peirce, and others see it as a specific type of inference (perhaps a kind of ampliative inference, such as induction or Bayesian reasoning), while still other philosophers, including some analytic ones, treat pragmatics as an empirical psychological theory of utterance meaning. Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, in The Handbook of Pragmatics, distinguish three general tendencies: those who treat pragmatics as a philosophical project; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who treat it as an empirical psychology of utterance interpretation.