When someone is pragmatic, it means that they are down-to-earth and realistic. They know what works and won’t work. They are not swayed by emotions and instead focus on facts, results, and consequences. They make decisions that will have a positive impact on their life or the lives of those around them.
The pragmatics are the set of rules that govern the behavior of a person or group, and they often take into account a variety of factors including the culture, social conventions, and individual perceptions. For example, a gesture that may be perfectly harmless in one country could be seen as highly offensive in another. You may be able to see how a person is being pragmatic by watching their body language and the tone of their voice.
Pragmatic is a philosophical movement that emerged in the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century and has influenced non-philosophers as well, notably in law, education, politics, sociology, and psychology. It argues that an idea is only true if it works and that unworkable ideas should be rejected.
The movement is named after the influential philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who first articulated its key ideas, and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910), who was a fervent proponent of pragmatism. The pragmatist philosophy has become increasingly popular in recent decades, particularly in the United States, and presents a third alternative to analytic and continental (or ‘Continental’) philosophy.
In a general sense, the word pragmatic has a connotation of ‘practical’ or’realist’ and refers to a worldview that is based on real-world observations. It is contrasted with idealistic philosophy, which focuses on concepts and theories that are not rooted in real-life experience.
For a philosophic movement to be pragmatic, it must incorporate a theory of meaning and language that takes context into consideration. It must also include a method of determining the truth of ideas and propositions. The pragmatic philosophers of the nineteenth century, including James and Peirce, used an approach called inference to the best explanation and weighed the probable general welfare when making decisions. This was a form of utilitarianism, which is now the foundation of modern policy-making.
The pragmatics is a branch of philosophy that studies how people use and interpret language in various contexts. It includes a theory of how different meanings can be derived from the same words and sentences owing to ambiguity or indexicality, speech act theory, and conversational implicature. It is a philosophical subfield that bridges the gap between semantics, which relates to what words mean in particular sentences, and pragmatics, which deals with the implications that speakers draw from their use of certain words. The Blackwell Dictionary of Philosophy describes pragmatics as a ‘field of study that concerns itself with the way in which conventional significance is supplemented by more general principles of interpretation using contextual information’.