Pragmatics is the study of socially constructed rules that guide how individuals interact with one another in social contexts. These rules can govern turn taking, greetings, eye contact and body language, the way we reference other people in speech and how others respond to those references. These rules are not explicit, but they can be implicitly learnt by observing the interactions of others.
In a philosophical sense, pragmatism is an attitude that sees the world as a series of problems to be solved rather than as a set of given facts. Pragmatists are concerned with what actually works or is effective in a specific situation. This is not to say that pragmatists do not believe in certain things such as the reality of the mind or the validity of logic, but they view these as a matter of practical concern and are less interested in the ultimate foundations of the truth.
As a general rule, pragmatists criticize the correspondence theory of truth and propose their own non-correspondence theories. These vary from a highly pragmatic account that is more or less naturalistic (James and Dewey) to an approach that is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of pragmatism and that posits some kind of indeterminate, pragmatically constituted, evaluative process that determines the truth value of utterances. This approach is often referred to as ‘pragmatic naturalism’ or ‘natural pragmatism’.
Pragmatists also offer a number of different ideas about the nature and the scope of knowledge. These include radical empiricism, the philosophy of science and, to a lesser extent, deflationism. The latter is based on the belief that a purely scientific observation or experiment does not necessarily imply a true or false judgment.
There are also a variety of other ideas that pragmatists have proposed, including ’empirical realism’, which holds that knowledge is derived through experience, as opposed to the more traditional idea that it is innate.
A particular version of pragmatism is known as Critical Pragmatics, which was developed by Korta and Perry. It emphasizes the’reflexive’ or ‘utterance-bound content’ and the’referential’ or ‘locutionary content’ of an utterance. The former is determined by the conventional meanings of words used and modes of composition; the latter is a function of an utterance’s truth conditions.
The main aim of Critical Pragmatics is to develop a theory that will allow us to understand the relationship between an utterance and its truth conditions. It does this by introducing concepts such as the speaker’s plan, a hierarchy of intentions, and the factors that supplement conventional meaning in order to get from reflexive to incremental meaning. In this way it is able to offer plausible proposals for addressing the speech-act and justification projects, but is on much more shaky ground when it comes to addressing the metaphysical project. In fact, it is hard to defend the idea that utility, verifiability or widespread acceptance are necessary and sufficient conditions for truth. Nonetheless, it remains an important branch of the pragmatist tree.