Pragmatic is the study of context and its contribution to meaning. It is a subfield of linguistics, but it also has implications for philosophy and other human sciences. It is one of the most active and well-developed areas of linguistic research. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragma, meaning “practical”. The term is also used in the field of ethics to refer to a practical approach or solution.
Pragmatists seek to reform existing philosophy and bring it more into line with the scientific method, which they believe should be applied to all aspects of knowledge including human experience. They differ from ordinary empiricism, which focuses on individual sensations and denies the importance of connection and meaning in experience. They call their approach radical empiricism, or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey’s terms.
One of the problems with contemporary philosophical pragmatic theory is that it tends to blur the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. This results from the fact that many pragmatic theorists, particularly relevance theorists, emphasize what happens beyond saying – that is, conversational implicatures of utterances. These are not traditionally considered part of semantics, so pragmatics tends to intrude on the traditional turf of semantics.
In addition, there is a growing interest in the study of computational pragmatics, which studies how human language processing and information processing work, and is an important aspect of artificial intelligence research. A key issue in computational pragmatics is reference resolution, which involves determining the appropriate target for a given description or other type of discourse act, usually using contextual information.
The pragmatic approach is often favored in business, where a realistic assessment of the risks and rewards of various options is more useful than a pure idealistic vision. In the political arena, the pragmatic approach is more common than the ideological one. For example, the pragmatic decision to settle a lawsuit rather than fight it in court is preferable to an idealistic one that might not achieve anything.
Other pragmatic approaches can be found in the sciences, especially biology and medicine. For example, the pragmatic stress syndrome has been characterized as a response to an adverse life event, such as the death of a loved one. The pragmatic model of disease has emphasized that the immune system responds to multiple environmental stresses, and that such responses may be responsible for some chronic diseases.
There are also pragmatic approaches in medicine and health care, such as the emphasis on patient-centeredness. This is an approach that has been promoted by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Science. It is designed to promote health by focusing on the patients’ needs and preferences, as well as their values and goals.
There is also a pragmatic view of bioethics, which has gained wide acceptance. The pragmatic view of bioethics emphasizes the responsibilities and duties of scientists to protect the public from harm, while recognizing that science can never fully predict what the effects of a new technology will be on humans. This has led to a number of pragmatic guidelines and protocols for researchers, regulators, and the general public.