Pragmatic is a word used to describe a person who deals with matters of fact rather than opinions. It also applies to a philosophy that stresses the importance of results and consequences over ideas and theories.
This approach to philosophical inquiry was originally formulated by Charles S. Peirce in his 1907 essay, ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’. He identified a fundamental clash between two ways of thinking and promised that his pragmatist approach would resolve the issue (James 1907).
In the last century or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in pragmatic theory and methodology. This has taken place both in philosophy and in linguistics, and in many other disciplines too, including sociology, business, law, management, psychology, music, art and medicine. Pragmatism has even made its way into the sphere of religious thought.
The philosophy of language is the main focus of pragmatics, but there are also pragmatist contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. For example, Mary Parker Follett, who studied with Royce at Radcliffe/Harvard, critiqued prevailing individualist ontologies by arguing for a concept of power-with rather than power-over in social relations and institutions (Follett 1918; 1924).
A major contribution from the pragmatist school is that of Jurgen Habermas. His concept of discourse ethics is designed to provide a framework for authentic, self-fulfilling communicative action and to help defuse the distortions that corrupt rationality in the contemporary world. He has drawn on pragmatism both in his neo-Marxian critique of the social structure of modernity and in his hermeneutic analysis of the ‘lifeworld’ of the human subject (Habermas 1981).
There is also an increasing tendency to integrate pragmatic research with other disciplines. This is particularly the case in the area of semantics, where work on the semantics-pragmatics interface is becoming increasingly sophisticated. In particular, formal techniques from the field of semantics are being applied to the study of context-dependence in pragmatics, speech act theory and conversational implicature.
Lastly, there is a growing awareness that pragmatic theory needs to incorporate experimental data from a wide range of participants and sources. This is a particularly important development given that utterance interpretations are highly sensitive to context. For this reason there is a move towards examining a variety of discourses, and the ways in which they are constructed, in order to build up an understanding of what makes them tick.
Despite these different developments, there is still a clear divide between those who see pragmatics, in the Gricean sense, as a philosophical project and those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar. This distinction is not completely sharp but it is a useful one for distinguishing various approaches to the pragmatics of linguistic interpretation.