Pragmatic is a philosophical movement that asserts that a philosophy or theory has value only in its practical results and that any idea that does not yield satisfactory practical results is unworthy of consideration. Pragmatism has had a wide-reaching impact, not only on philosophers but also on such fields as education, sociology, psychology, law, and literature.
This article deals with pragmatism as a philosophical movement and does not attempt to survey its diverse impacts in the above fields. However, a useful general introduction to pragmatics can be found in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fotion 1995).
The study of pragmatics is often seen as distinct from semantics and syntax. It is distinguished by its focus on the context-dependence of linguistic interpretation and the role that non-lexical elements, such as the speaker’s intentions and their strategies for expressing those intentions in the speech context, play in determining which proposition a given sentence expresses. It is thus a “paradigm for a general philosophy of language.”
For this reason, scholars have referred to it as a “philosophy of communication,” and have divided its many aspects into different sub-fields. These include, for example, near-side pragmatics, which focuses on the nature of certain facts about an utterance (such as the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and the generating of implicatures), and far-side pragmatics, which focuses on what is actually said or not said in the utterance (the discourse-functional analysis of the propositional content of a given speech act).
A person can be described as pragmatic if she or he is concerned more with what is, than with what could or should be. Such a person is likely to take action and think in logical steps, rather than thinking in abstract or idealistic terms. For example, he or she may settle a lawsuit because it will save time and money, rather than fight to the end.
Pragmatics is a broad field with many branches, ranging from the study of modals and the use of conditionals in speech, to cross-cultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, cognitive pragmatics, clinical pragmatics, neuropragmatics and historical pragmatics. It is possible, in fact, that the only true or complete definition of pragmatics will eventually be found through a convergence of these different approaches. For the moment, the field of pragmatics is so diverse that its practitioners are not in full agreement about what it really is or even what its major issues are. This diversity, perhaps, is commensurate with pragmatism’s stated commitment to pluralism.