Pragmatic is the study of what people really mean when they communicate with one another. It focuses on the context of a message and how the meaning changes depending on the situation and audience. It is an essential component of understanding human communication and interaction. It can be used to help with problem solving and resolving conflicts. For example, if someone is trying to get their point across in a meeting, using pragmatic techniques such as active listening, asking clarifying questions, and avoiding negative body language can help ensure they are understood. Having these skills can also make meetings more productive and less stressful.
One of the main aspects of pragmatism is its rejection of metaphysical and epistemological disputes that are not relevant to real world applications. For a pragmatist, the only way to evaluate a theory is by testing its practical relevance: “What concrete practical difference would it make if this (theory) were true and this (theory) was false?”
Pragmatism has long been seen as a philosophy of language, and the field of linguistic pragmatics developed from pragmatist ideas. The founder of the modern field of linguistic pragmatics is John L. Austin (1913-1996), who developed a theory of communication based on the idea that meaning is created through the interactions between speakers and listeners in an interlanguage. Austin’s work is still considered important by scholars of linguistic pragmatics and communication studies today.
Other major figures in the classical pragmatist pantheon are Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1912) and John Dewey (1859-1952). Like its classical precursors, pragmatism was a significant feature of American intellectual life for a half-century or so. But it soon was undone by the force that had originally sustained it: the progressive professionalization of philosophy as a specialized academic discipline.
By the early 1950s, pragmatism had lost much of its momentum. Though Quine, in particular, had qualified enthusiasm for parts of pragmatism’s legacy-a sentiment shared to various degrees by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), and Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), among others-mainstream analytic philosophers tended to ignore the pragmatic school.
In the 1960s, however, the burgeoning study of cognitive psychology gave new life to pragmatics as an empirical approach to philosophical inquiry. A number of psychologists, most notably B. F. Skinner (1904-1980), a disciple of pragmatism, introduced the concept of operant conditioning to psychology. This was followed in the 1970s by the development of cognitive semantics, a new pragmatic approach to language that is based on cognitive science.
According to Kaplan, pragmatics consists of two distinct branches: far-side and near-side pragmatics. Far-side pragmatics consists of the theory that one sentence can have different meanings in different contexts owing to ambiguity and indexicality, speech act theory, and the theory of conversational implicature. Near-side pragmatics consists of the study of what a speaker implies and a listener infers from contributing factors such as the situational context, the individuals’ mental states, and the preceding dialogue.
Some contemporary pragmatic theories, such as those of Korta and Perry, take a radically minimalist view of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. They argue that semantics and pragmatics share a common core of concepts, but pragmatics takes a far more contextualist approach to the interpretation of utterances than does semantics.