Pragmatic is a branch of philosophy that takes into account social and cultural factors when studying the use of language. It focuses on implied meanings in conversation and the context in which words are used. It is often compared and contrasted with linguistic semantics, syntax, and semiotics.
The study of pragmatics is important because it teaches us to take into consideration the situational and contextual meaning of our actions and thoughts. It allows us to understand the subtle art of communication and helps us to be a more empathetic listener. If we had to explain every little detail of our thoughts and intentions to other people all the time, it would be extremely difficult to communicate with them.
This is because we all have different understandings of what we mean when we say something, and the meaning can change depending on the context in which we hear the phrase. Pragmatics is a way of trying to disambiguate the meaning of an utterance and determine what the speaker intends by their tone, facial expressions, body posture, and other factors that can influence how we interpret the message.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatics was a reaction against the idea that ‘truth’ is a metaphysical property possessed by some propositions and not others. This approach was a popular one among American philosophers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with prominent figures such as Dewey, Peirce, Mead, and Williamson. However, as the progressive Deweyan era faded and analytic philosophy became the dominant methodological orientation in most Anglo-American philosophy departments, pragmatism started to lose its appeal.
One of the major problems was that pragmatists such as C.I Lewis and Sidney Hook focused too much on the technical details of definitions, rather than the broader issues involved in pragmatism itself. In addition, as analytic philosophy gained ascendancy, it began to seem that pragmatist ideas were old hat and were being superseded by more sophisticated arguments.
Some neopragmatists, such as Brandom, have attempted to resurrect the philosophy of pragmatics by focusing more on the semantics and syntax of an utterance. But this has resulted in the neopragmatists neglecting one of the fundamental ideas of classical pragmatism: that reference is always a matter of practice, not merely a matter of semantics or syntax. A major theory in pragmatics, called relevance theory (after the work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson), is concerned with the ways that speakers manage their ‘flow of reference’ by using context to determine what they are referring to. This is a key concept in computational pragmatics, which involves providing computers with this kind of contextual knowledge so that they can more accurately process natural human language and information. This is a part of the larger field of artificial intelligence research.