Pragmatic:
Pronounced prag-mat-ic, pragmatic is an adjective that means practical or realistic. Someone who is pragmatic is a person who focuses on what works best and avoids ideas that are theoretical or abstract. For example, a four-year-old girl who wants a unicorn for her birthday isn’t being very pragmatic.
In philosophy, pragmatic is also the name of a school of thought that focuses on what actually happens and how people respond to real-world events rather than what could or should happen. The word pragmatism derives from the Greek (pragma), meaning “deed.” The term has been used to describe philosophers and politicians who are more concerned with the real-world application of their ideas than they are with abstract notions. A pragmatic approach to solving problems is often more sensible, grounded, and efficient than an idealistic one.
A person who is pragmatic is also likely to have a lot of useful and important knowledge. For example, they may know how to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines in a conversation, or navigate ambiguity in context. This knowledge can be beneficial and even lifesaving in many ways.
The pragmatic view of language and the world is a fundamental one that is at the heart of human communication. It explains how we understand what others mean when they use language, and how we can learn from each other. This perspective is especially important in business, because it can help us communicate more effectively and achieve our goals.
The most famous pragmatic philosopher is John Dewey, who was influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. He developed a theory of learning and education that was based on what actually happened in real-life situations, rather than what should or might happen. He believed that a child learns more from what actually takes place than from what is written in books or told to them by their parents.
Contemporary pragmatic approaches are classified as either classical or contextual. The former argues that semantics is basically autonomous with little or no ‘pragmatic intrusion’; the latter holds that pragmatic considerations are very important and have a strong influence on all levels of discourse, including reference and ambiguity resolution.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy that studies the ways we use language in natural contexts. It focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions, the uses of language that require them, and the strategies that hearers employ to determine what those intentions are. It also examines the way that grammar, lexicon, and context shape what speakers can say.
Pragmatics is also an important field for computer science, since it allows computers to better approximate the behavior of humans in the way they process language and information. Victoria Fromkin, a computational linguist, writes that pragmatics is the “single most valuable component of human language processing systems.” This is because it allows the system to understand what you are trying to say, not just what the words mean in isolation.