Pragmatics is the study of meaning in a contextual sense. This differs from semantics, which focuses on the literal meaning of an utterance. Instead, a pragmatic analysis looks at the implied and inferred meaning of an utterance, taking into account things like social, cultural, and situational factors. Without the study of pragmatics, slang wouldn’t exist, jokes wouldn’t be funny, and conversations would be much less witty!
Pragmatism is often seen as a liberatory philosophy, as it rejects many of the Cartesian assumptions that dominated Western thinking at the time of its inception. It also draws on a number of other liberatory movements, including feminism (Seigfried 1996), ecology (Alexander 2013) and Native American philosophy (Pappas 1998).
A pragmatist philosopher will often look to the works of Peirce, James and Dewey for inspiration. However, a number of high-profile contemporary philosophers, including Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Jurgen Habermas, Robert Brandom and Susan Haack are considered to be pragmatists as well.
The most important distinction that needs to be made between a linguistic and a non-linguistic context is that the former refers to the surrounding linguistic environment, while the latter includes any extra-linguistic circumstances surrounding an utterance. This distinction has important implications for our understanding of a number of semantic phenomena, such as the nature of anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns, the designation of deictic demonstratives, the emergence of ellipsis in discourse, and the interpretation of certain grammatical features such as deictic indexicals.
As such, it is often helpful to consider the concept of context as being divided into a number of distinct sub-categories. The most intuitive of these is perhaps the difference between the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts, which can be further broken down into pre-linguistic, discourse, and interactional contexts.
A person who is pragmatic will focus on matters of fact and will be concerned more with the reality of an issue than its potential to create problems. They will be willing to make compromises to get the job done, but will not take shortcuts that can lead to unintended consequences.
Pragmatism is a philosophy of action, so its practitioners are usually active in the world around them. This can be as simple as volunteering to help out with a local community event, or it can be as involved as becoming a political activist. The philosophy has a strong societal impact, as it encourages individuals to think of the effects that their actions and words may have on others.
The pragmatist approach to life encourages us to be flexible and to embrace change as it comes our way, so that we can adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the modern world. This is why it has become so popular in business, as it allows people to be more innovative and inventive when it comes to finding solutions to problems, and to work together in a collaborative way to achieve common goals. It is also a philosophy that has many practical applications, and one that is widely used in the field of education.