Pragmatic is a philosophical concept that describes a person who focuses on what is practical and useful in a situation rather than theories or ideals. The term pragmatic stems from the Greek word pragma, meaning “action” or “practical.” A person who is pragmatic is willing to compromise in order to achieve a desired outcome. For example, a pragmatic person may choose to drive home early when heading to the airport so they can avoid traffic jams.
Pragmatism has influenced philosophers in a variety of fields. In linguistics, the study of pragmatics, or the way context contributes to meaning, is a branch of philosophy that combines grammatical analysis with theory and experimentation. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are known as pragmaticians.
In the field of philosophy, pragmatism has been applied to a broad range of topics including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Generally, pragmatist philosophers are critical of the pretension of formal logic to ultimate validity and see it as one tool among many for understanding language and reality. A variant of pragmatism that is less focused on logic and more centered on the real world has been described as ordinary language philosophy or naturalist pragmatism.
Other fields that have a pragmatic orientation include sociology, psychology, and biology. The work of psychologists James and Mead in particular has a pragmatist emphasis. Pragmatism is also a major influence on the work of biologists who have applied pragmatist methods to biological questions.
Pragmatism has been the subject of a number of books and articles. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on the topic. A book by Richard Rorty is often referred to as neopragmatism, although many pragmatists who take a wider view of the movement do not use the term.
The field of pragmatics has evolved rapidly over the last decade. Contemporary pragmatists have developed models of discourse that include both grammatical and semantic aspects of meaning. Among these, the most influential is Grice’s Conversational Implication theory. Other models consider a variety of issues such as metaphor, hyperbole, and politeness. The use of probabilistic and Bayesian methods in analyzing pragmatics has been extremely successful. The work of the MIT Pragmatics Center is particularly productive in this area. For example, a recent paper by Moumni and others provides a cross-cultural study of the pragmatics of politeness in parliamentary discourse. The paper’s results suggest that the notion of politeness is quite general across languages, and that speakers use a wide variety of strategies for indicating politeness in their utterances. These studies are a valuable contribution to the study of pragmatics and have contributed significantly to its growing importance in linguistics.