Pragmatics studies how language is used in context, rather than its grammatical form. It has several branches, including speech act theory, ad hoc pragmatics, and conversational implicature. It attempts to determine which proposition is expressed by a particular sentence in the context, and it tries to figure out what facts about the speaker are relevant to this determination.
For the philosophers, pragmatism was a response to the problem of coping with reality. It emphasized that scientific theories are tools or instruments, to be used as needed, and that their usefulness is measured primarily in terms of their success in solving real-world problems. The pragmatic approach to philosophy was a major challenge to positivist orthodoxy and influenced the work of such philosophers as John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Herbert Spencer.
A pragmatist is someone who acts, not talks, and takes care of practical matters in the short term, but who can also take a step back and consider big ideas. In contrast, an idealist is a person who spends more time talking than acting, and who is interested in philosophical questions that are not suited to a practical solution.
The pragmatist believes that human beings can be described as “problem-solving machines.” He is willing to use his mind, but not his emotions, to get the job done. The pragmatist is also prepared to change his mind, and to learn from mistakes.
Philosophical pragmatism emerged from informal discussions at the Cambridge Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s. The members included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two then-fledgling philosophers who would become the first self-confessed pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce, a logician, mathematician, and scientist; and William James, a psychologist and moralist armed with a medical degree.
While the pragmatists were developing their pragmatic theory, other philosophers began to develop analytic philosophy, a system of philosophical inquiry that is now the dominant paradigm in Western philosophy. Analytic philosophy emphasized the importance of breaking down complex concepts into simpler components, and it favored logical reasoning and clear definitions over traditional philosophical arguments based on ideas such as truth and falsity.
As an analytical philosophy, it is not surprising that many mainstream philosophers tended to ignore pragmatism, and for decades pragmatism was more of a footnote in the history of American philosophy than a significant intellectual movement. But in the 1980s, the pragmatists made a comeback, and since then, pragmatism has grown in prominence and influence in both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. The revival of pragmatism coincided with a revolution in the natural sciences and in the cognitive and social sciences. These advances allowed a more sophisticated analysis of the way in which people use language to solve real-world problems, and how this process is related to the structure of the universe itself. These developments provided a basis for a new discipline, which is sometimes referred to as ‘linguistic pragmatics’ or ‘psychological pragmatics.’ In the 1990s, it became a subfield of cognitive science.