Pragmatic is a word that gets used a lot to describe choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable. It’s a word that gets applied to political positions or positions of people on Twitter, for example, who take a “middle of the road” position that takes arguments from both sides into account. The meaning behind pragmatic is a little more complex than that simple definition, though. Pragmatists are logical and pragmatic people who understand that they can’t have everything they want, so they’re willing to compromise for the sake of getting something useful done.
A large part of pragmatics is the theory of context-dependence in language, which includes the theory of how one sentence can have different interpretations depending on what sort of things are happening in the particular conversation or utterance context it occurs within. This is a big area of research; there are many sub-fields in pragmatics, including conversational implicature, the theory of rephrasing, discourse analysis, and speech act theory.
The general philosophy behind pragmatics is that there are different truths in different contexts. For example, there is a certain degree of truth in biology, chemistry, math, history, and economics, all of which differ from each other in their particular contexts. However, it isn’t possible to have one all-encompassing truth that describes all of these things — and it’s probably not even desirable to try.
This is why pragmatics and the theory of context-dependence in language are so important. We need to be able to communicate with each other across these different contexts. In order to do this, we need to be able to understand what each person means in any given situation, what they’re trying to accomplish, the effects their utterance is likely to have on others, and the best way to achieve what they want from the interaction.
It’s also why pragmatics is so important in interpreting literature, understanding the way people talk on the phone or online, and learning about other cultures, because all of these things involve communication in some way. And if we can’t communicate with each other, we can’t achieve our goals and accomplish anything.
Psychologist and philosopher Paul Grice authored the four practical pragmatic maxims that are often referred to as the Cooperative Principle. These are: be clear, be concise, be honest, and be relevant. These are simple and easy to remember, and they can help us in our interactions with other people.
The boundaries between semantics and pragmatics are a bit blurry, as there are several different kinds of pragmatics, including formal and informal; theoretical and computational; and clinical, experimental and neuropragmatics. However, the basic distinction is that semantics studies sentences, whereas pragmatics focuses on utterances and their contexts. This makes pragmatics a field that is highly diverse, and it is important to understand the differences between these different kinds of pragmatics in order to be able to use them in various applications. For example, a teacher who learns about the importance of pragmatics in her teaching will be able to implement it into lesson plans for her English classes so that she can better teach her students how to communicate across different cultural and linguistic barriers.
