Pragmatic is a term used to describe choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable. It is often used in the context of politics when discussing political positions or actions. For example, when someone says they are being pragmatic about their views on immigration by taking into account the consequences for everyone involved, they are referring to the idea that results and consequences are more important than ideals. The word pragmatism can also refer to how people behave in their everyday lives. For example, when someone says they are acting pragmatically when paying for lunch with friends by splitting the bill evenly instead of trying to have the most beers or food, they are referring to their desire to get results rather than try to out-do others or compete.
The concept of pragmatism as a philosophical movement has gained renewed interest in recent decades, partly due to the success of Hilary Putnam’s influential work on the theme. He argues that many of the philosophical dichotomies that have traditionally divided philosophical thought such as fact/value, mind/body, and analytic/synthetic are inadequate and flawed. He asserts that pragmatism provides a ‘third way’ to think about the nature of knowledge, truth and values that reconciles skepticism with fallibilism, and embraces empirical methods and naturalism, while rejecting dogmatism.
Several different approaches to Pragmatics exist in contemporary philosophy, each with its own distinct set of characteristics. For example, some Pragmatic philosophers see the notion of communicative intention (first formulated by Grice) as the central tenet of pragmatic philosophy, while others place more emphasis on its interaction with grammar and its relation to meaning. Still other philosophers consider pragmatism to be a meta-philosophical project, aiming at uncovering the principles that govern human language use.
A related, but less well-established, approach to pragmatics involves the study of how people use language in social and cultural contexts. This approach is called ‘Pragmatic Linguistics’ and has attracted many researchers in the field of linguistics, sociology, and psychology. Typical research in this area includes experimental studies of reading-time data on how quickly people understand irony and other forms of pragmatic meaning, and the role that cognitive abilities such as mind-reading play in this process.
Another pragmatic approach is computational pragmatics, which seeks to model the pragmatic aspects of natural language processing in computer systems. This is a vital part of the development of artificial intelligence and can be seen, for example, in how computers resolve references such as names or locations to identify what they are talking about.