Pragmatic is the ability to recognize and make use of the contextual implications of verbal communication. It is the key to effective interpersonal communication and allows us to respond appropriately in different situations, avoid misunderstandings, and communicate more clearly. People who are pragmatic tend to focus on facts and reality rather than on feelings or wishful thinking, and they prioritize results and practical solutions over theories and abstractions. They are also excellent at identifying problems, analyzing options, and finding workable solutions.
Whether it’s understanding different body language, making appropriate greetings or farewells, using polite phrases, offering help or assistance, accepting or declining offers, or asking for clarification or repetition – all of these aspects of pragmatic communication are essential to our social success and well-being. Pragmatic language skills are especially crucial in the workplace, where we often communicate with colleagues from diverse backgrounds and need to understand a variety of cultures.
There is a small but growing tendency for work in pragmatics to include or reference experimental data, either from adults or children. This is important because, like semantics, pragmatic judgments are very sensitive to context. The main challenge for researchers is to be aware of the limitations of any method they employ in this context.
A major change has occurred in the way we think about pragmatism over time. In the early 1900s, Peirce and James emphasized that their philosophy was a way of settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable. These disputes centered on a fundamental clash of temperaments: the tough-minded empiricist commitment to experience and going by the ‘facts’ and the tender-minded adherence to a priori principles which appeal to ratiocination. Pragmatism promised to overcome this impasse by renaming one of these viewpoints pragmaticism and clarifying it.
In recent decades, however, there has been a move away from this ‘classical’ pragmatism and towards a more ‘linguistic pragmatics’. This pragmatics takes into account that the meaning of an utterance is determined not just by its truth value, but by its consequences and intentions. Thus, the study of pragmatics involves a careful consideration of the way in which the truth and non-truth values of an utterance are linked to its context, its goal or purpose, and its effects on its audience.
More recently, pragmatism has found a home in liberatory philosophical projects such as feminism (Seigfried 1996), disability studies (Keith and Keith 2013), environmental ethics (Norton 1994; Hester 2004), legal philosophy (Sullivan 2007) and Latin American philosophy (Dewey 2002). The progressive social ideals of classical pragmatism have lived on in some quarters too, with the work of philosophers such as Cornel West advancing a prophetic pragmatism in his writing on race relations, and that of Shannon Sullivan pioneering ‘whiteness studies’. This is a promising direction for pragmatics. But there is much more work to do if it is to be a truly ‘philosophical pragmatics’. This will require close attention to the people we are studying, the tasks that we ask them to perform, and the actual complex meanings that they interpret in their unique contexts.