Pragmatic is a term used to describe how people make decisions, taking into account what consequences they may have for others. For example, if you murder your creditor and get away with it, this may seem pragmatic from one point of view, but if it means someone lost their life and the community is now less prosperous as a result, then it’s not pragmatic in the larger sense. Likewise, it’s not pragmatic to go out and buy a new car, when you know that this will put you into debt, which will limit your future choices for the rest of your life.
The core of pragmatism is the Pragmatic Maxim, which Peirce proposed as a rule for clarifying and testing hypotheses by considering their implications in specific contexts. This led him to a distinctive epistemological outlook, which he called pragmatic realism and which influenced James and Dewey, although they developed it in quite different directions (see Pragmatist Realism).
Many pragmatists, particularly Rorty, blithely dismissed the notion of truth as a topic that would be better left alone, but this has caused a number of self-described pragmatist philosophers to protest and attempt to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity, with scholars such as Susan Haack, Christopher Hookway and Cheryl Misak being dubbed New Pragmatists. Others, such as Robert Brandom, have sought to place pragmatist ideas in a broader Western philosophical context, tracing connections between pragmatism and 19th century idealism, for example (Brandom 2010).
Whether or not we accept the core tenets of pragmatism, there is no doubt that pragmatics involves a wide range of topics. There is formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; game-theoretic, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural, interlinguistic and even neuropragmatics; and historical pragmatics, among other areas of study.
The field has also grown beyond its traditional North American centre of gravity, with vibrant research networks emerging in South America and Scandinavia as well as central Europe and China. The emergence of these new pragmatics is generally seen as marking the transition from ‘classical’ or ‘philosophical’ to ‘near-side’ pragmatics.
As ‘near-side’ pragmatics, the new pragmatics focuses on the ways in which utterance interpretation is structured by the environment in which it takes place. Thus, for example, a speaker’s intentions, a hierarchy of their goals, the relevant conventions and what they manage to convey are all important elements in pragmatics, whereas the facts about what an utterance refers to belong mainly to semantics.