Pragmatics is a field of study that investigates what people say and how they say it. It is a major area of research in communication studies and has many different subfields, including linguistic pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, and experimental pragmatics.
A person who is pragmatic thinks about how things will work and what results they will have, instead of thinking only about what could be or should be. The word pragmatism is sometimes used in contrast with other types of philosophy, such as metaphysics or epistemology. It is also sometimes used to describe a style of teaching that emphasizes practical skills.
In the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, knowledge comes from experience and is not necessarily abstract or objective. In this way, pragmatism is a form of anti-realism, which differs from the more familiar philosophy of objectivism. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is also a form of anti-skepticism, which is congenial to the older skeptical tradition in modern academic philosophy.
The field of pragmatics has expanded from its original philosophical roots to incorporate a wide range of research topics. For example, linguistic pragmatics includes work on word meanings and their contexts, the ways that words can be used to imply ideas or intentions, and the relationship between language use and social and cultural practices.
Other types of pragmatics include cognitive, experimental, and clinical pragmatics. In cognitive pragmatics, researchers attempt to understand the processes by which people acquire and use linguistic pragmatic rules. Experimental pragmatics investigates the relation between a task-dependent performance and the pragmatic theories that govern it. This type of study often involves the use of reading-time experiments, which are designed to measure the amount of time that it takes for participants to complete a task, and then to test various hypotheses about how the performance relates to pragmatic theories.
For experimental pragmatics, it is important to remember that participants in an experiment are not neutral. Participants are affected by their own goals and values, the tasks they are assigned, and the social and cultural landscape in which they live. This is why it is challenging to isolate and fully control the influences on participants in experimental pragmatics studies.
For example, in a reading-time study of the effects of scalar implicature or irony, participants will have to work through the implications of their own actions and the assumptions they make about how others will interpret their messages. In addition, they will be influenced by their moods and the beliefs they hold about the world and the roles they play in it. This makes it difficult to compare the results of a study conducted by one team of researchers with the results of a different team working on the same problem in a completely neutral environment. Nevertheless, there is still much work to be done in the field of pragmatics. It is a rapidly developing field that is influencing many other areas of the social sciences. It is particularly relevant to the field of public administration, which arose from the work of classical pragmatists like John Dewey and William James and Charles Sanders Peirce.