Pragmatic is a term used to describe someone who pays attention to the results of their actions rather than their ideals. It’s often said that pragmatic people are more successful in the real world than idealistic ones because they focus on what will work, rather than wasting time and energy trying to change the world to suit their own views.
The word pragmatic comes from the Greek praxi, meaning “practical,” and is related to praxis, the Latin for action or doing something. Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the connection between thinking and doing, with applications in fields like public administration, political science, leadership studies, international relations and research methodology.
Many philosophers have embraced pragmatism, with the most famous being William James and John Dewey. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism which, following Hume, tends to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. Instead they advocated radical empiricism or immediate empiricism, and sought to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, rather than reducing them to sense data.
Philosophical pragmatics, in particular, is a branch of philosophy that deals with language, communication and meaning. It’s divided into two broad areas: near-side pragmatics and far-side pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics deals with the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is meant by an utterance, such as ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives and anaphors. It’s also concerned with what Grice called conversational implicatures – the effects that an utterance can have on what happens beyond speaking it.
The field of pragmatics has a wide range of sub-disciplines, from computational and theoretical to intercultural and clinical. There’s also formal pragmatics, which uses the methods and goals of linguistic semantics. Pragmatics is also important in applied areas, such as computer-based communication systems and natural language processing. Computational pragmatics, for example, looks at how human users communicate their intentions to computers in order to reduce ambiguity and improve information processing abilities. Reference resolution, which is an important task in computational pragmatics, involves the identification of a meaningful object or event from a set of context-specific information. It’s a very complex process, but one that’s important to the success of any computer-based system. Similarly, the pragmatics of human communication is an area that’s essential to any human-to-human interaction. In fact, it’s so important that a number of social science disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, have incorporated pragmatic principles into their work. It’s also the basis for many business practices, such as customer service and sales training. This is because a pragmatic approach to business is often more effective than an idealistic one.