Pragmatic is a philosophical school that promotes the view that the meaning of any given language expression depends on the context in which it is used. Among the issues that it addresses are the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and the theory of speech acts and conversational implicature. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy defines pragmatics as “the study of the contextually dependent significance of expressions used in natural language”.
In some cases, a pragmatic approach can be more effective than an idealistic one. For example, in a lawsuit it may be better to take a pragmatic decision and settle rather than risk losing a large sum of money by fighting the case in court.
This pragmatic approach has also been applied to environmental problems such as the preservation of wildlife. In many cases, a more practical solution to saving species is needed than entrenched views that rely on an all or nothing strategy. The term ‘pragmatic’ is also used in business to describe a flexible approach to problem solving that adapts to the circumstances of the situation.
The pragmatist revival in the twentieth century can be traced back to American philosophers Peirce, James, and Dewey, who promoted a philosophy of inquiry that was open to empirical evidence. Later pragmatists, such as Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, have made ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist enlightenment and rejected dichotomies like fact/value, mind/body, analytic/synthetic.
Although Brandom is often cited as the leading pragmatist, his philosophical interests are quite different from those of classical pragmatists. He is critical of the pragmatic realism advocated by Rorty, and instead draws on a broad range of influences to develop a Sellarsian/pragmatist version of semantics that liberates us from the idea that the function of thought and language is to provide transcripts of reality. (Brandom 2011) His research programme has inspired a number of younger scholars to fruitfully combine Sellarsian and pragmatist ideas in the context of analytic philosophy.
A key feature of the pragmatist revival in the twentieth-century is that it has been accompanied by developments in linguistic and psychological pragmatics, which have developed from the pragmatist notion of the ‘intrusion’ of pragmatic considerations into the interpretation of an utterance. These new pragmatics include, among other things, Bach and Harnish’s SAS (Speech Act Structure), the theory of Conversational Implicture by Schilder, and the emergence of near-side pragmatics (by Davidson and others) in which the contextual factors are analysed as they apply to specific kinds of utterances: for example, the interpretation of definite articles, indefinite pronouns, anaphors, and presupposition. These approaches are now being incorporated into the general philosophy of pragmatics as an extension of the pragmatist model. Hence, the concept of pragmatics is now seen to be a unifying force in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. The development of these new pragmatics has been influenced by the work in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. In particular, it has shown that a variety of cognitive phenomena, such as metaphor and anaphora, are best explained by the theory of embodied cognition.