Pragmatic refers to the study of meaning in context—how language works, how people use it, and how ambiguity is disambiguated. It includes a wide range of concepts: semantics and metalinguistics, intercultural pragmatics, clinical pragmatics, neuropragmatics, game theory, experimental pragmatics, and more.
The pragmatist perspective suggests that a belief is only valid when it proves useful in inquiry or action, or when it helps you survive in the environment of intelligent organisms. If a belief fails to help you in either of these ways, it’s not useful, and therefore is not true. A pragmatist also rejects dichotomies, such as truth/false, mind/body, analytic/synthetic.
Dewey’s pragmatism has inspired scholars in a variety of fields, including psychology, history, sociology, and education. It is a central philosophy in education, providing a framework for understanding how students learn and develop social skills, as well as an ethical approach to educational policy.
In the 1920s, George Herbert Mead applied pragmatism to sociology and developed theories of human development that challenge prevailing individualist ontologies. Mary Parker Follett, who studied with Royce and James at Radcliffe/Harvard, developed a pragmatic philosophy of ethics, critiqued prevailing existentialism and objectivist ontologies, and emphasized the role of power-with rather than power-over in relationships between individuals and groups (Follett 1918; 1924).
While the pragmatist perspective is often considered to be amoral, I don’t think that it needs to be amoral. You can be moral or ethical, and still be a pragmaticist when you consider the consequences of your actions for yourself and others. For example, if you kill your creditor, this might seem pragmatic from your point of view, but it would be amoral because you deprived your community of a productive member.
Educators can support pragmatic development in the classroom by explicitly teaching children communication behaviors, using modeling and role-playing to show how to communicate effectively, and engaging in interactive activities that promote turn-taking, topic maintenance, and navigating ambiguity. Digital tools and apps can also provide visual supports, social stories, and collaborative group work to foster student communication.
The practice of pragmatism is a dynamic and evolving field, and we see many different pragmatics approaches emerge from researchers around the world. There is formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical, experimental, and clinical pragmatics; game-theoretic and cognitive pragmatics; intercultural and sociocultural pragmatics; and historical and philosophical pragmatics. But these research approaches all share a common foundation: the notion that language is essentially ambiguous, and the pragmaticist believes that our best hope for avoiding ambiguity is to be aware of the underlying pragmatic assumptions in our interactions. The more awareness of these assumptions we have, the less ambiguity we’ll encounter. Then, when we do encounter ambiguity, we’ll know how to deal with it. If you’re interested in learning more about pragmatics, check out our digital booklet, ‘Supporting the Pragmatic and Social Communication Skills of Deaf Students’. You can download it for free here. The booklet contains lots of information and fun activities that you can try with your students to build their pragmatic skills.