Pragmatic is the study of how we understand what others mean when they use language. It goes beyond semantics – which focuses on what words mean in a literal sense – and looks at context to understand how utterances can have different meanings depending on the situation and the social and cultural aspects surrounding them. Without pragmatics, we would have a very difficult time communicating and understanding each other – especially with all the ambiguities of our languages!
A person who is pragmatic is someone who is able to stay calm and think clearly in the face of confusion or conflict. This is because a pragmatic person can make decisions that are grounded in realistic, real-world circumstances rather than big-picture ideals and emotions. Being pragmatic is not always easy, but it is often essential in a society filled with chaos and constant change.
Philosophically, the term pragmatist has been used to describe many liberatory philosophical projects that seek to break free from dichotomies such as objectivity/subjectivity and truth/falsehood. For example, Peirce’s idea of a higher (‘third’) grade of clarity owes much to pragmatism as does his inquiry-based analysis of truth and Dewey’s idea of an ‘aspirational community of inquiry’. Habermas, who developed a discourse ethics that sought to provide a forum for authentic communicative action free from distortions of power and ideology, also drew on pragmatism to frame his ideas.
Pragmatists believe that research can avoid getting bogged down in metaphysical debates about the nature of truth and reality and instead focus on generating knowledge that is relevant and useful in the everyday world. This approach, which also incorporates an emphasis on using qualitative-dominant interpretivist understandings of socially constructed reality, has attracted interest from researchers in a variety of fields including psycholinguists, philosophers and psychologists.
One area in which pragmatism has proven to be extremely useful is in the field of research methodologies. As the scholarly community struggles to navigate a new wave of empirical crises – including repeated failures to replicate some experimental results – pragmatism has emerged as an alternative epistemological framework.
This is because it provides a clearer, more transparent and practical way to guide both the design and execution of research. By encouraging a more holistic and dialogical approach to research, it enables the researcher to surface complex themes and issues that may not be readily apparent in formal documentation or rhetoric.
In the case of research on language use, pragmatic theory has provided a framework for analyzing complex phenomena such as irony and sarcasm. For example, a recent study examining people’s understanding of online-delivered ironic utterances revealed that pragmatic knowledge plays an important role in interpreting ironic utterances, and this pragmatic knowledge appears to be accessed quite early during the interpretation process. Moreover, this research also showed that cognitive abilities such as mind-reading and executive functioning play a key role in irony understanding. This is further evidence that pragmatics is a core concept in the study of language.