Pragmatic is an adjective that means “dealing with things sensibly and realistically, based on practical considerations.” It’s also a philosophy that’s centered around doing what works best rather than being guided by theoretical principles. A pragmatic person is someone who’s willing to take steps toward improvement even if they’re at odds with their idealistic vision of how things should be.
Pragmatism, derived from the Greek word pragma, has been in use since ancient times to describe philosophical ideas that are concerned more with real-world application than with abstract concepts. It’s been used in philosophy, political science, business, and psychology, and is now a common part of everyday language.
The word pragmatic is used to describe the social, cultural and situational meaning of words, phrases and sentences – the stuff that’s beyond literal semantics. It’s the stuff that makes conversations work. It’s also the stuff that makes linguistics interesting.
Pragmatics studies the context-dependent nature of various aspects of utterance interpretation, focusing on speakers’ intentions and their strategies for communicating them. It addresses questions of what can be communicated using language, what can be inferred from the way an utterance is used (such as by ambiguity or indexicality), and how we determine what a speaker intends to communicate.
There’s a lot to study in pragmatics, and it’s a broad field. There’s formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; game-theoretical, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics.
The goal of pragmatics is to help people understand how languages work, and how to make the most of them in the context they’re used. Language is inherently ambiguous, and pragmatic knowledge helps us disambiguate meaning to facilitate communication. It’s the kind of knowledge that can help you understand why a friend might say “I found it under the tree” instead of “I put it in the tree.”
A pragmatic approach is usually more effective than an idealistic one. A pragmatic decision to settle a lawsuit is more likely to result in a positive outcome than an idealistic attempt to litigate the case. A pragmatic solution to managing food allergies is more likely to succeed than a rigidly ideological approach.
Pragmatic is a useful word in everyday life, but it’s also an important concept for students of language and philosophy to be aware of. When our four-year-old daughter asks for a unicorn for her birthday, she’s being pragmatic about her request. It’s a reasonable request, and her pragmatic parents will probably find a way to accommodate her. If they weren’t, the family would be arguing over the unicorn for months before finding a suitable replacement present. That’s the kind of pragmatic stress that we might all like to avoid.