Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. It’s a subfield of linguistics (and a part of philosophy) that is distinguished from semantics and syntax by focusing on what a speaker really means when they make an utterance — not just the phonetic and grammatical form, but their intended and believed meaning. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are known as pragmaticians. Pragmatics can also refer to a set of principles relating to communication, such as Grice’s pragmatic maxims.
A common use of the word is in the phrase “pragmatic approach,” which can be applied to many different types of situations. Being pragmatic is about taking into account the consequences of actions for all involved, and then deciding on what course of action will produce the best outcome. It is often considered a moral or ethical philosophy because it does not require any particular worldview or ideology, but rather simply takes into consideration what will work in the real world and what outcomes are likely to occur as a result of specific actions.
For example, if you and some friends go out to dinner and decide to split the check, it’s a pragmatic approach to take your share of the bill first before the guy starts complaining that he thinks he spent less than everybody else did or whatever other silly thing he might come up with. It’s not an amoral or immoral approach, it’s just something that makes sense and is probably the way most people would naturally go about things in life.
Similarly, a pragmatic approach to saving wildlife is to let nature take its course instead of trying to impose our own artificial notions of what that should look like. There is no need to get into a discussion of whether or not we should preserve endangered species because that will have little impact on the health of the ecosystem. In the end, it will be a matter of what is most practical for the species in question and its environment, not what we think should happen or what is ‘right’ in theory.
A variant of pragmatics that has become popular in recent years is computational pragmatics, a discipline of natural language processing (and, by extension, artificial intelligence). This involves providing a computer system with contextual information that it can utilize to more accurately model human language and information processing abilities. Reference resolution, for instance — how a computer determines when two objects are referring to the same thing or not — is a particularly important aspect of computational pragmatics.