Pragmatics is the study of language in context. It is not to be confused with semantics, which deals with the meaning of words and grammar, or syntax, which looks at relationships among symbols. Pragmatics goes beyond the literal meaning of words and sentences to look at how they are intended by speakers in particular situations.
The term pragmatics was coined in the 1930s by Charles W. Morris, though its roots go back to the 1870s and a circle of Harvard-educated philosophers called the Metaphysical Club. The members of the club included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two then-fledgling philosophers who would become the first self-conscious pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
A pragmatist is someone who seeks to derive a theory of truth and knowledge from experience. Pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth, which holds that true hypotheses must be able to account for all relevant facts about the world. Instead, pragmatists believe that what is true must be what is useful.
This stance has generated some interesting research into human cognition and communication. For example, researchers studying children’s acquisition of grammatical structures have found that they learn to associate certain forms with pragmatic functions, such as marking discourse-given entities with the definite-demonstrative determiner ‘this’. However, they also find that they are unable to mark mutual knowledge with this determiner, which demonstrates that they are not yet fully capable of understanding another person’s perspective on a situation.
One of the enduring questions in pragmatics is how much of the meaning of an utterance can be determined by the conventions of the words used and their modes of composition. Korta and Perry have developed a framework for understanding this issue, which they call critical pragmatics. They divide an utterance’s content into two concepts: the’reflexive’ or ‘utterance-bound’ content and the’referential’ or ‘locutionary’ content. The former is based on the conventional meanings of words and the rules for their composition, while the latter takes into account all relevant factors not determined by those meanings, including resolving ambiguity and reference.
In this way, critical pragmatics defines the boundary between what is known about pragmatics and what is not. Semantics falls on the near side of this boundary, and those parts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classical period fall on the far side.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism has ebbed and flowed over the decades. Its heyday was during the Deweyan era, when its proponents were championed by philosophers such as G. H. Mead and John Dewey, but its influence has waned since then. Its decline is due in part to the emergence of philosophy as a specialized academic discipline, and it has lost ground against rivals such as positivism and its analytic offshoot, analytic linguistics. In the end, pragmatism will survive only if it can develop an authentic successor. It seems likely that this will not happen until analytic philosophers take a fresh look at some of its most intriguing ideas.