Pragmatic is a word often used to describe someone who takes the practical side of a situation. They are willing to compromise in order to achieve a desired result, even if it means they don’t get everything they want. People who are pragmatic are also dispassionate when it comes to ideas and theories, focusing more on matters of fact than how they may be perceived or believed.
In philosophy, pragmatism is an approach to the formation of concepts, hypotheses, and theories. Its critical objective is to ensure that the resulting interpretations of reality are as useful as possible in achieving human purposes. This pragmatic attitude is reflected in the molding of language, theorizing, and logical analysis.
This broad philosophical approach to truth and meaning influenced many modern scientific, mathematical, and philosophical fields. It was particularly influential in the development of linguistics, sociology, psychology, and the philosophy of science. The pragmatists were especially critical of metaphysical doctrines in which change and action are reduced to mere instrumentality.
The discipline of Pragmatics is concerned with how humans use language to communicate their intentions and the ways in which utterances are interpreted in different contexts. Contemporary approaches to Pragmatics can be grouped into three general tendencies: those who see pragmatics as a philosophical project in Grice’s vein; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar, and those who view it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation. The latter group of scholars have developed a variety of tools, such as reference resolution (how a computer system determines when two words are the same or different) and contextualist models of utterance interpretation.
Some neopragmatists are epistemological relativists, and have taken the pragmatics of Peirce and Dewey to an extreme, but others are critical of this form of the philosophy. It is not uncommon for a scholar to hold a position that falls in between these two tendencies.
A related branch of pragmatism is Cultural Realism, which has its roots in American pragmatism but is closer to continental philosophy than its American analytic counterpart. In this approach, the pragmatists have been criticized for being too relativistic in their interpretation of the concept of truth and for failing to provide sufficient foundations for scientific inquiry.
Pragmatics is an important topic for speech-language pathologists to consider, as it relates to their ability to assess and develop students’ pragmatic skills. The pragmatist perspective is helpful for SLPs to understand the importance of considering both the big picture and the small details when assessing communication abilities, and it can be incorporated into both informal and formal assessments.