Pragmatic is the study of what people really mean when they speak and how that relates to the context in which they speak. It also looks at implied meanings. Without pragmatics, we wouldn’t be able to understand one another as well.
The term pragmatism was first coined by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and later popularized by his Harvard colleague William James. The pragmatists offered an alternative to both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions and continue to influence philosophy today.
Classical pragmatism was a philosophical movement that sought to incorporate the heuristics of everyday life in order to arrive at an original a posteriori epistemology. This pragmatic epistemology focuses on the usefulness of an idea or belief rather than its truth or falsity. This approach to knowledge enables us to weigh up pros and cons in order to find an effective course of action.
This pragmatic view of the world was largely inspired by social sciences like sociology and anthropology, as well as a range of natural languages. It was especially influenced by the work of George Herbert Mead, an American sociologist who was concerned with the ways in which individuals communicate and interpret their environment.
Applied pragmatics is used by speech pathologists and educators to help children with autism spectrum disorder to learn to use language effectively in the real world. They can teach children how to communicate with other people and how to interpret other people’s actions and language, and the results are often very positive.
For example, imagine a child who is extremely interested in superheroes. They can name all of the DC and Marvel superheroes, tell you their kryptonites, and what city they are protecting. However, when it comes to playing pretend with other children they struggle. This may be because the societal rules around eye contact and turn taking are different for their culture.
The neopragmatists who developed the pragmatism of the 1980s and 1990s were not as concerned with the pragmatic rules of different cultures. Instead, they focused on linguistic meaning, and a key aspect of this was Grice’s theory of implicature, which is the idea that speakers often imply things, rather than saying them outright. This explains why the same statement can have a very different meaning in different contexts.
For example, in some cultures it is rude to look a person in the eye when they are speaking, but this is not the case in others. In this way, neopragmatists have overlooked a central concept of classical pragmatism. This neglect has been criticized by some philosophers. They suggest that if we are to take pragmatism seriously, we need to address these issues.