Pragmatic is the term used for a style of thinking that’s focused on practical consequences and real-world results. Someone who’s pragmatic is practical and logical, they approach situations in a realistic way and make decisions based on what works best in the current situation. They’re not interested in theoretical considerations or philosophical beliefs. The opposite of pragmatic is dogmatic, which refers to someone who sticks to their beliefs no matter what.
Pragmatism is an important philosophy that focuses on context and reality. It began in the United States around 1870 and offers a third alternative to both analytic and continental philosophy traditions. The so-called classic pragmatists included Charles Sanders Peirce, who first defined and developed the view, and William James, a close colleague and sometimes interlocutor of Peirce’s. James’ Harvard colleague Josiah Royce, while formally allied to absolute idealism, also shared many pragmatic concerns.
Traditionally, philosophers of language have tried to understand how meaning is conveyed in particular contexts. They’ve looked at things like the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what an utterance means, how context influences the meaning of an utterance, and the ways in which a speaker’s intentions, actions, and strategies for communicating a message are reflected in an utterance. The discipline that studies these things is called pragmatics, and the linguists who study it are called pragmaticians.
A variety of different pragmatic theories have been advanced over time. The most influential are the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson, and the speech act theory of Carston. The two approaches have been criticized for focusing too much on what happens in the immediate vicinity of an utterance, rather than on the broader implications of an utterance, and for neglecting the innately meaningful content of the linguistic system itself.
Contemporary research in pragmatics has begun to explore what happens beyond the utterance itself, in what’s called “the far side of speech.” One area of this research is the study of what hearers do with the utterance, and how this might influence their comprehension processes. Another area is the study of how a speaker’s intentions, and their consequences, are reflected in an utterance.
A final area of contemporary pragmatics is the study of how pragmatics overlaps with Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to ascribe mental states to others. This is an extremely complex area of the field, and the research on it continues to be challenging. There is a growing body of empirical data available in the literature on the relationship between ToM and pragmatics, and there are some interesting and potentially fruitful ways in which these two areas of knowledge might interact with each other. Ultimately, though, a complete account of the relations between pragmatics and ToM will have to take into account both their similarities and their differences. For more information about the article, see the link below.