Pragmatic is often used in a positive way to praise choices or actions that are practical and sensible. It is also the name of a branch of philosophy that focuses on language use, and it has influenced a variety of disciplines in addition to the study of communication.
A person who is pragmatic is concerned more with what actually is rather than what might or should be. They are not afraid to compromise on theoretical ideals in order to accomplish useful, practical goals. For example, a pragmatist would probably not reject a lower-level job offer if it might lead to a better position in the long run.
Pragmatists understand that languages are inherently ambiguous and that people don’t always say what they mean. Thus, they are skilled at disambiguating meaning to facilitate understanding in conversation and other communication situations.
It can be difficult to define pragmatics precisely, but most of the literature on it describes it as the “science of the relation of signs to the objects that they may or may not denote.” It is a branch of semiotics, which deals with the whole process of sign-mediated interaction between living organisms (i.e., humans).
There are many different approaches to pragmatics, and it is often used in conjunction with other academic areas, particularly philosophy of language, semantics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. It is considered a part of the philosophical school of pragmatism, and its proponents include American philosopher John Dewey and British philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
Pragmatics involves the social and contextual factors that affect utterance interpretation, and it differs from semantics in that it does not focus on reference or truth. It is a kind of pragmatic cognition, which involves perception and rule-following that are augmented by some species of ampliative inference such as induction, inference to the best explanation, or Bayesian reasoning.
One way that teachers incorporate pragmatics into the classroom is by linking it to language functions such as greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, or apologies. Lessons on these topics generally involve analyzing the home and target cultures for differences in cultural pragmatics, but they can also focus on the ways that these functions are used in the students’ own languages.
For example, in the Forum article “Pragmatic Activities for the Speaking Classroom,” Joseph Siegel outlines an interesting activity in which students practice making requests by role-playing various scenarios with randomly assigned interlocutors. The students then discuss what they should and shouldn’t do to make requests in the given situations.
As with other aspects of linguistics, pragmatic knowledge is learned through exposure and naturalistic learning experiences. Most children pick up pragmatics naturally as they interact with adults and other children, but it is important to teach it explicitly in the classroom so that students can be successful communicators in a wide range of situations. This is a crucial part of being an effective global citizen. Moreover, pragmatic skills are also necessary for negotiating turn-taking norms in conversations and navigating ambiguity in context.