Pragmatic: People who are pragmatic tend to be concerned with things that actually work rather than ideas about what could or should work. The word pragmatic comes from the Greek pragmatikos, meaning “practical,” and it is often contrasted with idealistic people who think more about ideas than about how they are going to apply those ideas in real life. Many people navigate life with a healthy dose of both idealism and pragmatism: they strive to achieve their ideals while focusing on the most realistic options and courses of action.
The term pragmatic was first used to describe a philosophical position in print in 1898, when William James coined it as the name for his own version of pragmatism in a lecture at Harvard University. James scrupulously swore that he was merely restating doctrines that had already been articulated in print by his compatriot Charles Sanders Peirce, who had been using the term to designate his own philosophic views for three decades.
Though pragmatists disagreed over many aspects of philosophy, they shared a belief that knowledge is an instrumental value and should be applied for practical purposes in order to control reality rather than merely to appreciate it. They also believed that change is a constant feature of life and that it is important to adapt to it, not to deny it or worship it at the highest levels of the hierarchy of values.
As a research paradigm, pragmatism emphasizes the use of multiple methodologies in the same study and focuses on the integration of quantitative and qualitative data. It is an appropriate method for studying complex, real-world problems.
It also places a high value on the participation of people with lived experience in the research process. This makes it a suitable approach for clinical practice and policy development, where the knowledge generated by the research can be immediately applied to improve patient outcomes.
The field of pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and related disciplines that focuses on the context in which language is used and the relationship between the speaker, the hearer, and the intended meaning. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are known as pragmaticians and focus on understanding how language is used in natural situations, not merely in its phonetic or grammatical form.
In the field of pragmatics, it is believed that most human utterances are ambiguous and that knowledge of the pragmatics of language allows us to disambiguate them and understand what was really meant. For example, if someone tells you that they found an old painting under a tree, you can interpret the sentence as either “the picture was discovered by the painting underneath the tree” or “the painting was found by a person underneath the tree.” Knowing what pragmatics is all about helps you distinguish between these two meanings and figure out what the speaker really meant.