Pragmatic is a word that describes a person who tends to be practical, realistic, and sensible. It can also refer to a philosophy that determines the meaning and truth of concepts through their direct practical consequences. The pragmatic view is often used in a positive way when describing someone who is able to stay calm and make decisions based on real-world circumstances instead of being swayed by heightened emotions or ideals.
A person who is considered pragmatic can make decisions based on the outcome that will have the most beneficial effect for everyone involved. They are able to see how different options may impact their current situation and are willing to compromise to achieve a mutually agreeable solution.
People who are pragmatic can be found in a variety of fields including business, politics, science, education, and psychology. The pragmatic view is widely accepted as being a more reasonable and fair approach to solving problems than the dogmatic and inflexible approaches often adopted by more traditional schools of thought. The pragmatic philosophy has helped to advance a number of modern fields such as cognitive behavioral therapy, sociolinguistics, and the field of human factors engineering.
One of the main arguments for pragmatism was that ideas and propositions should be evaluated based on their ability to work, and that those which are unworkable should be rejected. This pragmatic definition of truth arose primarily from the teachings of James and Peirce, but has since been refined by Dewey and others. A common misunderstanding of this pragmatic view is that it promotes the notion that all truth is useful, but this view is incorrect. In reality, pragmatists like James and Dewey simply interpreted the concept of utility as the idea that true opinions generate acceptable results.
In this sense, pragmatics is a set of questions concerning the nature and function of language. It addresses such issues as what a particular phrase means, what it is meant to accomplish, and how the utterance is meant to be understood by its addressee. There are many different branches of pragmatics, including formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; game-theoretical and experimental pragmatics; clinical, neuropragmatics, and sociocultural pragmatics; as well as historical pragmatics.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism grew out of the United States in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It has influenced non-philosophers as well, particularly in the fields of law, education, politics, business, sociology, and psychology. There is also a related pragmatics in the sense of linguistics, which deals with the semantic and syntactic aspects of language. Bach and Harnish’s SAS is a major development in this discipline, as it attempts to unify these two broad pragmatic disciplines into a single coherent whole. It can be seen as the closing of the ‘Classic Pragmatics’ period and the opening of near-side pragmatics, which is concerned with the actual process of utterance interpretation. This new branch of pragmatics is a much more scientifically rigorous and mathematically driven field, than the classical pragmatics.