Pragmatics is the study of what people mean when they speak, the ways their utterances convey meaning to other speakers and the socially-conditioned responses that follow. It is the “other side of the coin” from semantics, syntax, and semiotics.
Semantics is the study of rule systems that determine the literal linguistic meanings of expressions; syntax explains how language is structured; and semiotics investigates the signs that surround speech and other expressions. However, pragmatics encompasses both the semantic and nonliteral aspects of communication, and examines how physical or social contexts can influence their use (see BuzzFeed’s article, 19 Simple Gestures that Might Be Highly Misunderstood Abroad for examples).
While pragmatists have rejected the notion of “truth” in the sense that only those who are able to do what they wish will believe what they say is true, this does not necessarily mean that pragmatism is false. For example, if you tell a child that invisible gremlins live in electrical outlets and will bite if they are touched, the belief that this is true “works” because the children do not touch the outlets. However, it does not work if the children have other beliefs that are more accurate than yours and that those beliefs do not lead to any harm or inconvenience.
The interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics has led to a wide range of experimental techniques in the field. These can include studies measuring the time it takes people to read phrasal or sentence-level meaning, as well as experiments investigating conversational implicature and other kinds of discourse structure. There are even studies that measure eye-movements to see how people process word meanings in context.
Unfortunately, the results from these studies are often contradictory and inconclusive. This is part of a larger problem in psychology, dubbed the “replication crisis,” where studies with very different methodologies yield very different results. In many cases, this is a result of the fact that different methodologies have very different ways of measuring the same thing. Whether this is the result of how the methodology measures the phenomenon, or the way the phenomena themselves interact with the method, it can lead to some pretty confusing findings.
As a result of the difficulty in making sense of experimental results, some scholars have argued that some methods are better suited to exploring pragmatics than others. For example, researchers have defended studies measuring the time it takes people to read specific words as more informative than those studying overall cognitive effort or other more global processes. This is part of a broader argument for methodological pluralism in cognitive science, which argues that the best way to understand how human minds work is through multiple approaches and disciplines. This is an ongoing debate, and new research will hopefully shed light on the complexities of human communication. This will hopefully lead to more accurate, more useful predictions about how people will act in particular situations. After all, that is the real goal of pragmatics: to help us understand how we communicate with one another, and how those communications might evolve over time.