Pragmatic is a term that is used to describe someone who deals with things in a practical way, meaning he or she looks at the facts and what is likely to happen rather than idealistic theories.
When it comes to understanding the pragmatics of language, there are some important factors to keep in mind. For example, it is critical to understand that people are not able to process every possible context of an utterance (for instance, the implication of “I have two sons”). This is why the field of pragmatics focuses on contextual information, allowing us to create a theory of how people understand each other’s linguistic communication in specific contexts.
Another aspect of pragmatics that needs to be taken into account is that a person’s understanding of an utterance is dependent on the task they are engaged in during the experiment. For this reason, experimental pragmatics should include an explicit or implicit task that the participant must complete. Unfortunately, the inclusion of a task is often overlooked in many pragmatic studies, and this can lead to inaccurate conclusions about how real people understand language.
Some philosophers who are considered pragmatists have gone as far as to define truth as “what works.” In other words, Peirce’s instrumentalist school of pragmatism is all about making sure that beliefs are “warranted” by the processes that they go through. In the end, pragmatists were most critical of moral and metaphysical theories that fail to take action into account, as they believed that change is an intrinsic feature of reality and should be accepted for its pragmatic benefits.