Pragmatic is an approach to philosophy, primarily held by American philosophers like William James and John Dewey, that holds that the truth or meaning of a statement is to be measured by its practical (i.e. pragmatic) consequences. Pragmatism is also sometimes called American pragmatism because of its proponents who, including Mead and Dewey, were members of what is known as the “Chicago club.”
In general, pragmatism holds that beliefs are only valid if they help us make sense of the world around us. This is in contrast to idealism, which holds that a belief is true because it is a representation of some sort of reality, whether or not that reality is objectively real.
It is also in contrast to skepticism, which essentially holds that there is no way to prove a statement to be true and therefore it cannot be used to guide one’s actions. Pragmatism is thus somewhere in between these two extremes.
The field of pragmatics seeks to answer questions like, what does it mean for a person to say “I’m sorry” when someone says something that hurts their feelings? And what is the relationship between a person’s brain’s ‘wiring’ and their ability to understand a speaker’s contextual sounding of words and phrases?
Another area of pragmatics, often called computational pragmatics, is integral to the field of artificial intelligence. It involves teaching a computer to respond to incoming data using context, which allows the computer to more closely approximate natural human language and information processing abilities. For example, reference resolution, which is the process by which a computer system determines when two objects are different or identical, is a crucial part of computational pragmatics.
There are many ways to teach pragmatics in a language classroom, and this month’s Teacher’s Corner will feature several pragmatic activities for students, including an activity that provides students with scenarios of how to make requests and then asks them how they would respond. Other pragmatic activities include role-playing the appropriateness of greetings with people in various situations.
A third pragmatic activity, featured in the Forum article “Luck of the Draw (Pragmatics),” is a game that provides students with a variety of requests and asks them to decide what the appropriate response is. In addition to a classroom-friendly activity, the Forum article features some useful links for learning more about pragmatics and its application in language acquisition.
Pragmatism has many flaws, and the most obvious occurs when it is applied to moral or ethical issues. Most people immediately recognize that if it is used to determine what is right or wrong, then the entire framework of pragmatism implodes, and we end up with a kind of relativism. The key to pragmatics, however, is that it focuses on how things work, not necessarily what is true or false. This is in contrast to idealism, where we have a vision of the ideal, and then work to achieve it. This is the kind of pragmatism that makes sense to most people.