Pragmatic is a philosophical viewpoint which tries to make sense of human language and communication. It also deals with the relationships between the meaning of words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, and the speaker’s intentions and actions.
The first generation of pragmatists included Charles Sanders Peirce, who developed the view and wrote its early manifestos, and his Harvard colleague William James, who popularized it and made many important additions. They were influenced by the scientific revolution then taking place around evolutionary theory and were critical of both analytic philosophy and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions like idealism.
‘Pragmatism’ is a third alternative to analytic and continental philosophy and has attracted increasing interest among philosophers, particularly in the United States. It is a major part of the contemporary philosophical landscape and has been an important influence on science, education, sociology, psychology, law, business, and political thought.
Its main goal is to develop an account of communication that can deal with the complexity of human behavior and language, a problem which has proved difficult to solve. In order to do this, pragmatists have emphasized that human meaning cannot be reduced to a single word or symbol. They argue that communication is a process of inference, and that we must interpret messages according to their intended meanings. This requires a kind of reasoning that goes beyond mere perception and rule-following and may include induction, inference to the best explanation, or Bayesian inference.
One of the most recent developments in pragmatics has been the development of experimental pragmatics, an area of research which seeks to determine how people understand and use language in specific situations. This has led to criticism from certain quarters, particularly within linguistics and psycholinguistics, who have doubted that the phenomenon of pragmatic meaning can be reduced to a series of behavioral experiments.
However, despite the criticisms, pragmatics is a viable and important field of study and one which continues to grow. It provides useful insights into the nature of language and its relationship to human behavior, and can be used in the teaching of linguistics as well as other disciplines. For example, in the Forum article “Pragmatic Activities for the Speaking Classroom,” Joseph Siegel describes an activity for learning about pragmatics using request scenarios. The teacher comes up with a range of different scenarios in which a request could be made and the students decide how they would respond to each situation. They then discuss why some responses are appropriate for the scenarios and why others are not. This is a great way to help students develop their pragmatic skills and become aware of the complexities of real-life social interaction.