Pragmatic is the term used to describe a person who is concerned with matters of fact and is realistic about real-world circumstances. People who are pragmatic are often seen as sensible and level-headed. They are also typically able to make practical decisions that are likely to have positive effects. Occasionally, the word pragmatic is used in a negative way to suggest someone is being self-serving or a stickler for rules.
Pragmatism is a philosophy of life and living that focuses on practical, reasonable choices and courses of action. This philosophy is usually contrasted with idealism, which is more concerned with big-picture ideals and emotions. People are considered pragmatic if they can remain calm under pressure and make good decisions in the face of uncertainty.
One of the main differences between semantics and pragmatics is that semantics concerns itself with signs and their denotations, while pragmatics focuses on the way that these signs are used. This is why some philosophers have viewed pragmatics as more of a social science than a philosophical discipline.
Many different theories of pragmatics exist. There are those who see it as a philosophical project, much in the line of Grice’s work; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who view it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.
Contemporary pragmatics is defined as the study of speakers’ communicative intentions and the contexts in which they use language. The theory is not intended to replace or compete with the linguistic and theoretical work done on syntax, semantics, and meaning; rather, it provides an additional perspective, adding a dimension that is relevant for understanding the role of language in human communication.
For this reason, pragmatics is often defined as a subfield of linguistics. However, some scholars have argued that pragmatics should be distinguished from linguistics in general because it addresses issues related to the actual, real-world use of language, while linguistics deals with the formal structure of grammatical languages.
In addition to semantics, pragmatics also studies linguistic phenomena such as ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names and indexicals, anaphoric pronouns, and deictic demonstratives. These pragmatic phenomena are considered near-side pragmatics, and they focus on the nature of certain facts about an utterance that help to determine what it is trying to say.
There are also far-side pragmatics, which deal with the effects of an utterance beyond its expression in a linguistic context. These effects may be what causes a particular utterance to generate the entailments it does or its consequences, such as the implications of a statement in a context. For example, the speaker’s apprehension of whether or not he/she will be understood as meaning the same thing by another speaker is an implicit pragmatic issue. This is known as the metapragmatic issue. Moreover, the theory is concerned with interlinguistic and intersociocultural pragmatics as well as historical pragmatics.