A pragmatic approach is one that prioritizes real-world scenarios, practical considerations, and outcomes. It involves flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to compromise. It is often contrasted with idealism, in that idealistic people tend to think more about the best-case scenario rather than the most realistic options or courses of action. However, many pragmatic individuals navigate life with a healthy balance of pragmatism and idealism, often compromising for the sake of results.
The word pragmatic comes from the Greek verb “pragmatizo” meaning to make or do something practical, to consider the implications of an action, or to weigh a situation in terms of its usefulness, benefits, or costs. The term is generally used in the context of philosophy and a philosophical perspective known as pragmatism, which seeks to apply logic to all areas of human knowledge, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
One of the first philosophers to embrace pragmatism was William James, who proposed that a person’s experience is more important than a particular theory or concept of reality. James was the father of the pragmatic tradition, which has influenced modern psychology, philosophy, and religion.
Pragmatics is a philosophical discipline that deals with the nature of meaning, value, and the relation of signs to their interpreters. It studies the role of context in the interpretation of language, and its branches include the theory of speech acts, the theory of ambiguity and indexicality, and the theory of conversational implicature.
It is a close cousin of semantics, which deals with the meaning of words and the objects that they may or may not denote. Morris’s 1938 definition describes the difference between the two disciplines: Semantics deals with the significance conventionally or literally attached to words and sentences; pragmatics, on the other hand, looks at the further significance that can be worked out on more general principles and based on contextual information.
More recently, linguistic pragmatics (also called formal pragmatics) has sought to clarify the distinction between the two approaches by emphasizing the importance of the context in the interpretation of an utterance. The work of Bach and Harnish (2005), for example, offers a detailed study of the structure of utterance interpretation as an inferential process. It can be seen as a transitional stage between the classic or far-side pragmatics and the near-side pragmatics that will be explored below.
Another branch of pragmatics is cognitive pragmatics, which focuses on the mental processes involved in the understanding and production of language. The work of Bruno Bara (2006, 2008) is particularly influential in this area. It argues that communication is a collaborative activity, in which both participants consciously construct meaning. This theory combines a number of previous pragmatic theories, and combines formalized reasoning with a form of ampliative inference.
The pragmatic theory of meaning is a broad and rich field, and it encompasses a wide range of sub-fields. These include, but are not limited to, the theory of ambiguity and indexicality, the theory of speech act theory, the theory of conversational implicature, the theory of pragmatic inference, and the cognitive processes involved in interpreting language.