Pragmatic is a term used to describe the way that people use language in context. It is often contrasted with the idealism that focuses on ideals, such as a desire to always pursue one’s principles no matter what. People who are pragmatic are more concerned with realistic options and courses of action that will produce the best results. This is a good thing, because not everyone can be an idealist all the time, and it is often best to find a balance between pragmatism and idealism.
A word like pragmatic might seem to have nothing to do with philosophy, but it is actually a philosophical concept with deep roots. It derives from the Greek pragmatikos, meaning “active, versed in affairs” and pragma, meaning something done or a fact. The root of the English word is also related to the Latin prassin, or “to do” and the Greek prassa, or “to take hold of,” which may explain why it is used to describe something logical or sensible.
Philosophical pragmatics is an approach to the theory of linguistic interpretation that considers the impact of context on the meaning that a sentence has. It includes the study of how a sentence’s meaning changes based on ambiguity and indexicality, as well as the theory of conversational implicatures.
In contemporary philosophical pragmatics, there is a debate about the extent to which semantics and pragmatics overlap. Some philosophers, such as Korta and Perry, maintain that the line between semantics and pragmatics should be drawn at the level of utterances, while others, such as relevance theorists, take a wider view that includes considerations of what happens before and after a statement is made.
The question of whether the utterance-bound pragmatics that Korta and Perry discuss should be separated from the far-side pragmatics that is the focus of relevance theory is an important issue, especially since the two approaches tend to differ in how they define what is said. For example, the utterance-bound pragmatics of relevance theory defines what is said as propositions that can be’resolved’ by conventions of meaning, precisification, disambiguation, and reference fixing. This definition of what is said excludes a number of things that would be considered to be a part of semantics, such as the social taboo indexes in the Dyirbal languages of Australia, which require speakers to use a different lexicon when talking to certain relatives.
By contrast, the utterance-bound pragmatics that are studied by pragmatic philosophers such as Cappelen and Lepore include any information that is encoded in an utterance or can be discerned from its contextual circumstances. It is this information that gives pragmatic meaning to an utterance, as opposed to the information that makes a phrase or sentence meaningful to its hearer. This is an important distinction because it shows that there are pragmatic concepts and phenomena that go beyond what conventional semantics can deal with, and that the study of these things belongs in a discipline called pragmatics.