The word pragmatic is related to the root pragma, meaning “to do.” A person who is pragmatic is someone who weighs what can realistically be done in the real world rather than what should or could be done. Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that emphasizes practical consequences in the determination of meaning, truth or value, and it has been influenced by the work of 18th century British empiricism (particularly the works of John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain and John Venn) as well as Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of knowledge as an inferential process.
Among contemporary philosophers there is considerable variation in the approach to pragmatics. Some, called ‘Literalists’, believe that the core of language is a system of autonomous semantics, and that pragmatic considerations only intrude at the margins of this; these essentially concern matters that are beyond saying. Others, such as Gricean theorists and neo-Griceans, take a similar view, but add that pragmatic considerations also intrude on the core of language in the form of implicit meanings generated by an utterance. These are known as far-side pragmatics.
Another broad school of pragmatics concerns what are known as near-side pragmatics. These are the issues that are primarily the concern of pragmatics, including resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, reference, indexicals and demonstratives, as well as questions of presupposition and quantification. Near-side pragmatics, like far-side pragmatics, involves perception augmented by some kind of reasoning – perhaps inference to the best explanation, or a variant of it such as Bayesian reasoning; but it is an integral part of the discipline.
There are many other aspects of pragmatics that have been dealt with by different writers. In general, these fall into two camps: those who think that the study of pragmatics is essentially a subfield of semantics; and those who believe that there are separate disciplines of semantics and pragmatics, with a close connection between them. The latter camp, which includes most neo-Griceans and the majority of contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics, is sometimes called the pragmatic revolution.
This pragmatic revolution has seen the rise of a broad range of approaches to linguistic pragmatics and has pushed the boundaries of the discipline, as we have come to know it, well beyond what was thought possible at its inception. Moreover, the pragmatic approach to language has been adopted by some non-philosophical areas of social science, such as communication studies.