Pragmatic is a term used to describe an individual who takes a realistic approach to problem-solving and is willing to compromise to get the job done. A pragmatic person is usually more successful at getting things done than someone who is more idealistic in their approach. This is because pragmatic individuals are less bogged down by abstract theories and more focused on what is actually achievable in real-world scenarios.
There are numerous definitions for Pragmatic. Some define it as being practical, down-to-earth and no-nonsense; others see it as a character trait that involves having a sense of reality and a focus on results and effectiveness. Regardless of how it is defined, there is no doubt that the pragmatic mindset is one that many people find appealing and useful. In a business environment, pragmatic thinkers are great at understanding what is possible and focusing on the most effective ways to achieve their goals. They are also great at taking risks because they know that the rewards of being bold can be quite substantial.
The word Pragmatic can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary under the following meanings:
1 a. Of or relating to pragmatism; based on practical considerations; practical 2. a. Of or relating to the pragmatics of language; a theory of how to interpret an utterance – for example, the ability to infer the communicative intention behind a speaker’s literal words. This concept is closely related to the idea of pragmatic competence, which refers to the ability to perform this inference task.
The emergence of the discipline of pragmatics was spurred by the discovery that there are a number of important differences between literal meaning and the actual interpreted meaning of an utterance. It has also become clear that this understanding is more than a matter of understanding the underlying grammar; it requires a kind of inferential process which bridges the gap between the literal meaning of an utterance and its intended construal.
It is therefore not surprising that there are various philosophical approaches to pragmatics, including those who think that semantics (or linguistic meaning) is basically autonomous and independent of pragmatic considerations; those who see pragmatics as a fundamental part of context; and those who take the basic outlines of Relevance Theory but perhaps demur on some of its details and psychological orientation. There are also different subfields of pragmatics such as formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; intercultural, intralinguistic and experimental pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics.
There is also a large and active community of psycholinguists who study pragmatics. They have often combined a philosophically inspired theory of pragmatics with an empirically oriented psychology of the human process of interpreting utterances. These studies often involve presenting individual participants with a variety of stimuli, and the results are then analyzed in order to understand people’s pragmatic performance under these different conditions. There is much work to be done in this area because of the enormous amount of within-individual variation that exists, due both to a range of bodily, linguistic and situational factors that affect pragmatic interpretation.