Pragmatic describes an approach to a situation or problem that is realistic and considers the practical consequences of actions. Hence, we might say that someone who is pragmatic is willing to compromise on his ideals or plans for the greater good. We often use the word as a contrast with someone who is idealistic, for example, “I need a candidate that’s pragmatic and can get things done in the real world—not some stuck-up idealist who won’t compromise.”
Some of the key issues addressed by the philosophy of Pragmatics include what we mean when we say something, the particular circumstances under which an utterance is made, the intentions behind our communication and whether or not it successfully conveys those intentions. A few general lines characterize contemporary pragmatist thinking: those who see pragmatics, much in the spirit of Grice’s theory, as a philosophical project; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar and semantics; and others who see it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.
The pragmatist philosophy originated in the United States around 1870, and today presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910), both of whom were logicians, mathematicians, scientists and moralists armed with medical degrees. Their ideas were further developed by their students Josiah Royce (1955-1916), an engineer, and Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1929).
Though Quine’s (1908-2000) classic article, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, challenged positivist orthodoxy by drawing on pragmatism, many analytic philosophers have continued to ignore it. Despite this, there has been a recent resurgence in interest in the ideas of pragmatism, and some analytic philosophers have begun to integrate pragmatic thought with their own.
There is also an increasing amount of empirical evidence supporting pragmatic ideas, such as the finding that developmental psychologists assessing language-delayed children report pragmatic impairments more frequently than syntactic or semantic impairments. Further, a number of experimental studies have shown that pragmatic development is statistically independent of lexical and syntactic development—for instance, Snyder’s [14] study of language-delayed children shows that their abilities in pragmatic terms are significantly advanced over that of their normal peers even when they are equally delayed in lexical and syntactic terms.
Although a number of different approaches to pragmatics are possible, the most common view is that a speaker’s intended meaning can be understood only in terms of the specific context and idiom of his communication. In this way, pragmatics aims to identify the ‘rules of communication’ that govern how words are used in particular situations and the ways in which they can be misunderstood or misused in those contexts. This idea is reflected in the name of the discipline: ‘pragmatics.’ The following resources are available to help you learn more about the philosophy of Pragmatics.