A pragmatic person tries to deal with things sensibly and realistically. They’re focused on practical considerations and aren’t swayed by theories or visions of how things should be. They know that there are limits to what they can achieve and try to get the most out of a situation with the resources available to them.
Someone who takes a pragmatic approach would likely be more interested in the consequences of their actions than they are in following a moral code or in upholding their principles. They are willing to let their feelings and emotions go for the best result. A pragmatic person may be the type who makes decisions based on how it will impact their family, friends or coworkers rather than a strict code of morality or their beliefs.
The term “pragmatic” refers to a philosophy that is rooted in both philosophy and social science. It deals with the study of language, communication and context. The main purpose of pragmatism is to understand how a message or idea is conveyed in different situations. It also looks at how the meaning of a message can be changed by the way it is delivered and the context in which it is spoken.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that has roots in the American tradition and presents an alternative to both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation of self-consciously pragmatist philosophers was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910), who are known as the classical pragmatists. Peirce, a logician and mathematician, is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism.
James’s Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (1855-1916), although officially allied with absolute idealism, was an important interlocutor for pragmatism. A broad thinker who attacked mainstream variants of foundationalism, he is often considered the intellectual grandson of Dewey.
A more recent development in pragmatism is Korta and Perry’s Critical Pragmatics. This is a minimalist theory of meaning that replaces the notion of semantic content with two concepts: utterance-bound and reference-bound content. The former is a set of truth conditions for the utterance that correspond to the conventional meanings of words and modes of composition; the latter includes all relevant factors not determined by those conditions, such as ambiguity and reference resolution. This theory is a more radically minimal version of pragmatism than the classical pragmatists developed in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It is also a distinctly postmodern version of the theory. The concept is widely used in communication studies and has implications for the way we interpret, understand and use language. It is also used in other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. The pragmatics of language and communication is a growing field that will continue to be an important part of human understanding.