Pragmatic describes a person or approach that is practical, realistic, and grounded in the real world. For example, someone who is pragmatic would not expect a four-year-old to want a unicorn for her birthday. The word pragmatism also refers to a philosophy that stresses real-world applications of ideas rather than lofty notions or abstract principles.
A number of disciplines have played significant roles in the development of pragmatics, including philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Morris drew heavily on his background as a sociology professor, and his work built upon the foundation laid by George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist. Mead’s writings and lectures helped define pragmatism as a philosophy that “deals with the relation of words to what they mean in particular circumstances, to the speaker, to the context, to the listener, and to his or her intentions” (Pragmatism Cybrary).
The philosophical movement known as pragmatism developed from the informal discussions held by a group of Harvard-educated men in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1870s. This Metaphysical Club included future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), proto-positivist Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, a philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist.
Early pragmatists rejected the idea that all knowledge comes directly from direct experience. Peirce, for example, argued that experiences are “theory-laden,” meaning that they come to us filtered by our beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world around us. Therefore, the raw sense data we perceive cannot serve as a basis for judging theories or even worldviews. This is a central theme of pragmatism, and it has been emphasized by subsequent pragmatists, such as Sellars, Rorty, Davidson, Putnam, and Goodman.
Experimental research in pragmatics has yielded intriguing results. For instance, researchers have studied how people interpret scalar implicatures, understand irony, and comprehend novel metaphors. However, the complexity of pragmatic phenomena makes interpreting and applying theoretical models challenging. And the fact that experimental findings often contradict one another contributes to a larger concern within the field of psychology—the “replication crisis.”
To overcome these challenges, scholars need a deeper understanding of the cognitive presuppositions that shape specific pragmatic phenomena and a more robust toolkit for individual differences measures that follows best practices in the field. Then, they can better connect the theory to the data in a way that is both meaningful and credible. This will enable pragmatics to continue to make a valuable contribution to the broader field of cognitive science.