Pragmatics is the difference between the literal meaning of words and their intended meaning in social contexts. It takes into account things like irony and metaphor, and helps us disambiguate meaning to facilitate communication. It’s the reason why you can say “I think that tree fell on the house” and mean something quite different from what someone who doesn’t know the tree would logically expect you to mean.
The linguistic field of pragmatics is very rich and complex, with implications for semantics, morphology, syntax and the cognitive processes that underlie language usage. But the philosophical implications are even more intriguing, and have led to a broad range of different views of pragmatism. These views span a wide range of traditions in philosophy, including analytic, continental and hermeneutical.
A classic example of this is John Dewey, who was a key figure in the development of American Pragmatism. Dewey’s pragmatism was heavily influenced by Peirce, and he is often seen as the founder of modern American philosophical pragmaticism. However, as the twentieth century progressed, pragmatism lost much of its momentum and prestige. This is largely because of the emergence of analytic philosophy.
Newer neopragmatists have also come under criticism for neglecting some of classical pragmatism’s central ideas. For example, Robert Brandom has argued that pragmatists do not believe in a universally objective ‘truth’, and that the pragmatist notion of experience is just one possible way of understanding truth. Other neopragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, have criticized Brandom’s characterization of pragmatism, and have emphasized the importance of experience in interpreting truth.
One of the most important developments in recent pragmatism has been the work of Jurgen Habermas. He combines analytic philosophers’ goal of systematically theorizing language with a neo-Marxian and hermeneutic critique of the hegemony of utilitarian rationality in contemporary society, drawing on Mead’s pragmatist analysis of the self as irremediably social. He also develops a discourse ethics, based on the concept of communicative action in which the truth-seeking role of the individual is a matter of choice.
Pragmatics is an important topic for a variety of reasons, and the study of it can give us valuable insights into human behavior and the nature of our world. The ideas behind pragmatism are as important to our culture as the alphabet is to grammar, and it is worth exploring this fascinating school of thought to see where it may lead us.