Pragmatic is a word that describes an approach or way of thinking. It focuses on practical and real world things and often involves considering the context of situations when making decisions or choices. People who are pragmatic think about how things will affect them in the real world and tend to be more interested in results and effectiveness than theory. It is a good word to describe people who are down to earth and don’t get carried away with ideas and thoughts that are unrealistic. It can also describe a person who isn’t dogmatic about morals or beliefs and is willing to try new things.
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that originated in the early twentieth century. The main tenets of this philosophy are that truth is relative and subjective, that experience is the source of knowledge, and that life is an ever-changing process. This movement grew out of the work of philosophers such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. The work of pragmatist philosophers has had important impacts in science, psychology, education, sociology and business.
The term pragmatic was first used by psychologist Morris 1938 to distinguish pragmatics from semantics, referring to the “science of the relation of signs to objects which they may or may not denote.” It was Morris’s belief that the study of pragmatics could make the biggest contribution to the philosophy of language, because it provides insights into how we use and understand language in actual communication situations.
Experimental pragmatics emerged in the 1970s when psychologists studying developmental psychology and psycholinguistics began to investigate people’s pragmatic meaning-making abilities, a departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. At the time, some critics within linguistics and psychology were skeptical about the possibility of scientifically examining pragmatic language production and interpretation.
Today, the field of pragmatics includes many different subfields: formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; game-theoretic, clinical, and experimental pragmatics; intercultural and interlinguistic pragmatics; neuropragmatics; and historical pragmatics. It is difficult to create a coherent account of what pragmatics really is. It is a large and highly complex subject, and its implications are wide-ranging and far-reaching.
Contemporary pragmatics has also been influenced by the philosophy of action. For example, pragmatist philosophers such as Brandom have developed ways to reconcile Sellarsian and pragmatist views of the relationship between speech acts and their referents.
The pragmatist view of actions is that they are based on the consequences for both the actor and the receiver, so that actions need to be motivated by their purpose and goal. For example, if someone kills their creditor to avoid paying their debts, it is not pragmatic because it leaves them with a bad reputation, other creditors will be deprived of payment, the community might lose a productive member, and so on. For this reason, a pragmatic approach to ethical behavior is required. This is in contrast to the moralistic or principle-based view of ethics that is common in the Western world.