Pragmatic is a word used to describe people and ideas that focus more on practical outcomes than on abstract notions. A pragmatic four-year old wouldn’t dream of a birthday filled with unicorns, for example, but would probably ask for ice cream instead. Pragmatic is also the name of a philosophical school that is concerned with how ideas are put into practice. It is an approach that has been popularized by John Dewey and William James, but has since lost much of its original vigor.
It’s an approach to language use that focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions and the contexts in which those intents are expressed (and understood). This is in contrast with the traditional focus of philosophy on reference, truth, and grammar.
One of the earliest philosophers to introduce pragmatism was Chauncey Wright, who wrote that pragmatism was “the method which appeals to the practical and actual as opposed to the theoretical and abstract.” Another prominent early pragmatist was John Dewey, whose wide-ranging writings had considerable influence for a half-century. But after Dewey, pragmatism lost its luster, and it was gradually overtaken by the self-consciously rigorous import of analytic philosophy.
Today, there is still interest in pragmatism. It is the basis for liberatory philosophical projects in areas such as feminism, ecology, and Native American philosophy, among others. Pragmatics is also a core concept in cognitive behavioral therapy, which emphasizes changing the ways we think about and react to specific situations.
A key idea in pragmatism is that there is a fundamental conflict between two kinds of people: those who rely on their experience and go by the facts, and those who favor a priori principles and rational reflection. Pragmatism attempts to resolve that clash.
The most important practical theory in linguistics is the theory of natural pragmatics, a field that developed around 1940. Natural pragmatics aims to explain how meaning is created and conveyed in human communication, including the use of demonstrative adjectives such as these, that, and there. The theory is based on the fact that these words and sentences don’t make any sense without the context they are in. It also assumes that there is an underlying logical system in human communication that makes it possible to understand the grammatical rules of language and to predict how people will respond to certain utterances.
In addition to natural pragmatics, there are a number of other important practical theories in philosophy. For example, critical pragmatism focuses on the speaker’s plan – a hierarchy of intentions – as the main source of the facts that supplement conventional meaning and get us from reflexive to incremental meaning.
Another pragmatic theory is the concept of the modal operator, which asserts that the modal operators’maybe’ and’maybe not’ are the same, with the latter being an expression of uncertainty. Finally, there is the theory of minimal pragmatics, a version of which was developed by Korta and Perry in 2008 and published in ‘Critical Pragmatics.’