Pragmatic is a philosophical movement that emphasizes the connection between thought and action. It has been influential in fields such as social work, public administration, and leadership studies.
The word pragmatic derives from the Latin verb pragma, meaning “to pursue.” As such, pragmatism is rooted in a concern with practical matters and results, rather than idealistic notions of what could be or should be. People who are pragmatic are concerned with what works and what doesn’t, and they tend to be flexible and adaptable in their approach to problem-solving. They are often called matter-of-fact, rational, and sensible.
Many philosophers have contributed to the pragmatist tradition. Some have attempted to place pragmatism within a broader Western philosophy, for example tracing Peirce’s significant debt to Kant (Apel 1974; Gava 2014) or connections between pragmatism and 19th century idealism (Margolis 2010; Stern 2009). Others have sought to revitalize pragmatist ideas by combining them with insights from analytic philosophy and other traditions (Heney 2004; Saul 2011).
A defining feature of pragmatics is that it considers the contexts in which utterances are made and their consequences, both in terms of what speakers intend to communicate and what they actually manage to convey. Different pragmatic theorists focus on different aspects of this process, and we can broadly divide their approaches into ‘near-side’ and ‘far-side’ pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics is focused on the properties of utterances that help to determine their meaning, such as a speaker’s intentions, the particular circumstances in which they say them, and what they have already done with them.
Far-side pragmatics is focused on what happens beyond what speakers say: the way in which their utterances interact with other events, how they influence one another, and what implicatures emerge from them. These include the ways in which utterances might affect the behavior of their addressees, the way they influence our perceptions of them and our judgments about them, and the ways in which they might help or hinder communication.
While the term pragmatic is often contrasted with idealistic, many people navigate life with a mix of vision and pragmatism. We are all familiar with the expression, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This suggests that a person will choose to settle for something that is practical and useful rather than risking everything on an idealistic path that might not be achievable.
Contemporary pragmatics comes in a variety of forms, reflecting the wide range of disciplines and methodologies it draws from. There is formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical, experimental, and clinical pragmatics; game-theoretical, neuropragmatics, and intercultural pragmatics; and history of pragmatics. Despite these differences, there are certain general lines that run through contemporary pragmatics: those who see it as a philosophical project along Grice’s line; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who take a primarily empirical psychological view of utterance interpretation. Each of these has its own subfields.