Pragmatic refers to the study of language and communication that looks beyond literal linguistic meaning and considers context. It is the most widely-studied aspect of human interaction, integrating both the logical inferences made from communication and intended meaning with semiotic aspects of non-verbal communication. It is considered one of the most important fields in linguistics and has become an increasingly interdisciplinary field.
A pragmatic person is concerned more with results and consequences than with ideals or philosophies. They prefer incremental improvement over revolution and believe that the best way to achieve something is through doing it rather than just talking about it.
The pragmatic school of philosophy originated in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century and is still a significant movement within philosophy. It has influenced many other disciplines, such as law, education, sociology, psychology and literary criticism.
Pragmatism is a philosophical theory that holds that an idea or belief is true only insofar as it is useful. This idea is often compared to the utilitarian view of morality that places more emphasis on the benefits of an action over the intent or beliefs of the individual performing the act.
In this sense, pragmatism is an antithetical position to the traditional metaphysical and idealist schools of philosophy. It has also been viewed as a skepticism about the ontological claims of religions but not a denial that there are transcendent realities. It is a position that has been associated with William James, a Harvard University professor and psychologist, who was a founding member of the Metaphysical Club, a group of Harvard-educated men who discussed philosophical issues informally in Cambridge during the early 1870s.
This group included the proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and two future pragmatists—Charles Sanders Peirce, an American logician and mathematician and William James, who was a physician as well as a philosopher and moralist.
A major concern for pragmatists is the indeterminate nature of the meaning of words and phrases. As the field of pragmatics has expanded, it has come to encompass several areas of research including turn taking, recursive utterances and the ways that children learn the meaning of words.
The pragmatists rejected the Lockean notion that the mind is a blank slate on which experience impresses itself and the Kantian notion that it is a dark chamber into which the light of experience streams in. Instead, they proposed that the mind has a more complicated structure and is constantly being modified by our interactions with the world around us. This view has led to the development of a number of pragmatic theories that have emphasized convention and context in determining meaning. In particular, they have incorporated the concept of Grice’s implicature into their work. This principle, which he called ‘the law of relevance’, states that an utterance conveys its full meaning only if it is relevant to the situation in which it occurs. This is a central idea of pragmatics and is the basis for much of the theory that people learn from the context in which they are speaking.