Pragmatic is a word often used to describe someone who takes a practical approach or strategy in a situation. For example, if a person is pragmatic about dealing with an illness, they may choose to take medication rather than fighting it through natural means such as diet or exercise. Someone who is pragmatic is also described as reasonable and logical. They tend to be hard-working and realistic in their choices. People who are pragmatic also often get along well with others. However, if someone is too pragmatic, they can sometimes forget about the bigger picture and focus only on what’s necessary to achieve their goals. Pragmatic is often contrasted with idealistic. Many times, idealistic people are told that they need to be more pragmatic in their choices and in how they live their lives. This usually means that they should try to consider other options or courses of action (the pragmatic ones) in addition to the one that is most based on their ideals.
The term pragmatic was coined in the 1970s by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language and communication. He argued that meaning is something that cannot be reduced to the literal meaning of an utterance, but must involve some kind of inferential process of what a speaker intends to convey (called communicative intention). This process involves inference and the use of linguistic rules for interpretation and understanding.
Grice authored what are now known as the Gricean Maxims, four general pragmatic rules that appear to hold in most situations and most languages. These maxims include: be concise, be truthful, be relevant and be clear. These are all considered basic to the theory of pragmatics.
A criticism of this pragmatic approach to truth is that it can be relativistic, because it seems to accept that some statements “correspond” to a state of affairs and some do not. A possible response to this criticism is that the neo-pragmatic account of truth is not meant to be a full-fledged theory of truth, but only a description of how we understand the meaning of what we say and hear in natural communication.
Another important issue is the extent to which pragmatics overlaps with Theory of Mind, a cognitive faculty that allows us to ascribe mental states to ourselves and others. The current literature suggests that, while they do share some features, pragmatics and ToM are distinct faculties, and further research will be needed in order to disentangle the nature of their relation. In this paper we have argued that pragmatics, in particular the Gricean Maxims, is a useful framework for considering the relationship between pragmatics and ToM. IG, FB and MT discussed the idea. IG wrote the initial draft of this paper, and MT revised it. All authors read and approved the final version. The research was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council. The authors wish to thank the ARC for their support. The funder had no role in the design of the study, collection, analysis or interpretation of data, writing of the report or the decision to submit for publication.