Pragmatic is an approach or way of dealing with problems that emphasizes practicality, realism, and logical thinking. People who are pragmatic think of what actually works in the real world and don’t get bogged down with idealistic theories that might never work in practice. Pragmatics is also the study of language and the ways we use it. It is a subfield of linguistics that studies how context contributes to meaning, as opposed to phonetics or grammar. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.
One of the most influential writers on this philosophy was philosopher Charles Peirce. He was an American polymath who made contributions to several fields, including chemistry, biology, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, logic, sociology, and science. He developed pragmatism as a philosophical perspective that emphasized practical applications and outcomes, rather than purely theoretical or ideological considerations.
In the early 20th century, pragmatism experienced a resurgence as a philosophical movement. This was partly due to the influence of Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, who argued that pragmatism provides the foundation for contemporary philosophy and for the reintegration of analytic and continental approaches to philosophy. Putnam characterized pragmatism as an “anti-foundationalist philosophy” that is not limited to a particular discipline and that rejects dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body, and analytic/synthetic.
Another contributor to the revival of pragmatism was anthropologist George Herbert Mead, who critiqued prevailing individualist ontologies and developed a social pragmatism that focused on relationships between individuals in organizations. Mary Parker Follett, who was influenced by Mead, also contributed to pragmatism with her focus on community and social responsibility.
Applied pragmatics, on the other hand, is a broader field that seeks to understand how utterances are interpreted in context, and how people manage to communicate their intentions with each other. It is concerned with speakers’ plans, a hierarchy of intentions that they have in mind, and the strategies that people employ to determine those intentions and to interpret them. It is this last aspect that is most formally described in the work of Carston and others, which includes near-side pragmatics, computational pragmatics, and critical pragmatics.
In computational pragmatics, an important question is how to enable computers to communicate their plans and intentions with each other in a manner that is as close to human communication as possible. This field, which is an important part of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, involves incorporating contextual information into the system so that it can more accurately predict the meaning of a person’s words. Reference resolution, the process by which a computer determines whether two objects have the same referent, is a key component of computational pragmatics.