Pragmatic is the study of language and the contexts in which utterances are made. It focuses on what the meaning of an utterance is rather than what words are uttered. Without pragmatics, we would have no understanding of what other people mean when they say things. For example, a gesture that is understood as a neutral act in the United States could be highly offensive in Greece. This is because cultures have their own set of semantics and idioms. This is a very basic example, but one that illustrates how essential pragmatics is to human communication.
A number of philosophical movements look to pragmatism for guidance and support. Some of these include feminism, ecology, and Native American philosophy. These movements use pragmatism as a way to avoid polarizing debates and focus on the practical consequences of different theories. They also use pragmatism as a tool to help them define their goals and values in a more objective manner.
While many philosophers have contributed to pragmatism, it became widely accepted in the academic world in the early 1980s. It is now considered one of the most important philosophical traditions. The philosophy of pragmatism is often presented as a way to clarify (and in some cases dissolve) intractable metaphysical and epistemological disputes.
Philosophers who have contributed to the development of pragmatics include sociologist George Herbert Mead, psychologist James Morris, and philosopher William James. Morris and Mead’s works were influential in the development of pragmatism, particularly in its emphasis on the social aspects of human thought and action. Anthropology and sociology are also important fields in the study of pragmatics.
The major concepts of pragmatics are speech acts, rhetorical structure, conversational implicature, and management of reference in discourse. In linguistics, a speech act refers to any utterance that has a specific purpose. Rhetorical structure is the arrangement of words and phrases in an order that conveys a specific message to the audience. The most common types of rhetorical structures are declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Conversational implicature is a type of implicature that happens in conversations, and it is a way for speakers to imply something without directly saying it. Management of reference in discourse refers to the ways in which listeners track syntactic (relating to syntax) clues about who performed an action and what exactly happened.
Computer pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that deals with the process by which computers communicate their intentions to each other. It is an essential part of natural language processing and uses contextual information to better approximate human information processing abilities. Computational pragmatics includes reference resolution, which is the ability for a computer to determine whether a word or phrase means the same thing in all languages. It is also used in computer security to ensure that the software programs being run are trustworthy. The goal of computational pragmatics is to make computers more able to understand humans and allow them to function with a higher degree of accuracy than is currently possible.