Pragmatics (from the Greek pragmatikos, “to do”) is an ancient philosophy about practical wisdom and action. In modern times, the word pragmatic has taken on several new meanings. It has been used to describe ways that people do things, such as the use of cognitive behavioral therapy or the application of damage control tactics during war. It has also been used to describe a philosophical approach to the relationship between knowledge and reality, such as John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of education or Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. It has also been used to describe the study of what people say and how they do it in their speech and writing, a field of linguistics known as pragmatics.
The core of the pragmatist philosophy is that truth depends on context. When a person speaks, they express their beliefs and intentions in a particular situation. These factors determine what they mean by their words and how others understand them. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The pragmatics of human language is a complex subject, with many different elements. But the fundamental principle is that a speaker intends to communicate something meaningful and relevant to their listeners. The speaker will choose words and phrases that can convey this message in a way that will be understood by the listener.
A pragmatist perspective also has the potential to provide a more objective basis for criticism and evaluation of institutions and social practices, such as those in a democracy or a market economy. This was a key theme of the classic pragmatists, whose work gave rise to an original a posteriori epistemology. It is a theme that has continued with a number of liberatory pragmatist projects, including those in areas such as feminist and ecological philosophy (Alexander 2013) and Native American philosophy (Pratt 2002).
In the linguistics of pragmatics, one important issue is that there are no universal grammatical rules that can govern what people say. However, there are certain general principles that seem to hold across languages and situations. These are known as the Gricean Maxims and were formulated by the philosopher of language Paul Grice. They include: Be Brief. Say only what is necessary. Be Explicit. Be Explicit about your assumptions and beliefs. Be Cooperative. Communicate with other speakers to help everyone understand each other. These maxims help linguists determine what makes an utterance pragmatic.
There are a number of other aspects to pragmatics, including interlanguage pragmatics and computational pragmatics. The latter is a part of the larger science of natural language processing, which attempts to model how human languages and information processing operate. It is a very challenging area of research, with many competing claims being made. Nevertheless, it has been a major focus of pragmatics for over half a century. It is expected that the field will continue to expand and evolve, with further contributions to linguistic theory and other areas of philosophy. This article uses examples from corpora and sources on the web to illustrate current usage of the word pragmatics.