Pragmatic is a philosophy that understands knowledge to be inseparable from action within the world. The term is also used in the linguistics discipline to describe how context contributes to meaning.
Philosophical pragmatism represents an alternative to both the analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide, offering an approach to truth that is primarily grounded in how human beings interact with reality. First developed in the United States around 1870, it was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James. James and Peirce’s pragmatist ideas were influenced by the scientific revolution taking place at the time around evolutionary theory.
Since its initial emergence, pragmatism has attracted a wide range of supporters and critics. Its basic idea is that there are no ‘truths’, only useful or’real’ beliefs. It is these that can be true or false depending on how useful they prove in an individual’s struggle with the real world, for example, through trial and error and the acquisition of experience.
It is a pragmatic view that, in the final analysis, nothing but’real’ belief has any validity, and that only useful or’real’ beliefs can be considered truths. The philosophies of Kant and Kant’s student Friedrich Wilhelm Wittgenstein are also pragmatic, as is the philosophy of John Dewey, who was an early proponent of the pragmatic method.
Linguistics is the science of language and its use, with a special emphasis on linguistic behavior. It is an area of study that evaluates how the social context influences speech act execution, i.e., what a speaker intends by their words and how the listener interprets these intentions. Linguists who specialize in this field are known as pragmaticians.
Pragmatics is a subfield of the philosophical discipline of semantics. The main distinction is that whereas syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. In pragmatics, the goal is to find ways to match up sentences of a natural language with the propositions that are being expressed by them. This is done through a process of characterization that is based on features of the speech context in which a particular sentence is being uttered.
Another key feature of pragmatics is the role that non-linguistic signals play in communication. These include facial expressions, body language and tone of voice. Communicators need to be able to interpret these cues in order to communicate effectively.
In the 1970s, philosopher of language Paul Grice authored what have come to be known as the four pragmatic maxims, or the Gricean maxims: Be polite. Be brief. Be frank. Be relevant. These are general rules that seem to hold for most situations and languages. They are like the glue that holds a conversation together and are critical to successful communication. A good communicator will follow these maxims and avoid ambiguity or obscurity, even if they disagree with other members of the group. For example, in a political debate, the more pragmatic person is likely to take a middle of the road position that will be well received by all parties and will most likely yield positive results.