Pragmatics is the study of language and communication. It is a subfield of philosophy and it studies the use of language in context, rather than studying its logical structure or semantics. Pragmatics deals with how meaning is conveyed through a spoken or written statement by considering the speaker’s intention, the audience’s expectations, and how the utterance fits into the conversation in which it is being used.
Some of the branches of pragmatics include the theory of speech act, conversational implicature and a variety of theories of reference. It also focuses on how the ambiguity of a word can affect its meaning in different contexts, as well as how different words can be used to mean the same thing.
Among the first self-consciously pragmatists were two Harvard-educated men who met to discuss philosophical matters in a club called “The Metaphysical Club” during the early 1870s. The men were proto-positivist Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), and two then-fledgling philosophers who would later become known as the fathers of American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910).
These men eschewed the grand syntheses and sharp debates that characterize traditional philosophy in favor of what they took to be more relevant questions. They criticized what they saw as the excessive focus on concepts and ideas that are purely theoretical, as well as the rigid distinctions between things like truth, reality and goodness. They emphasized the importance of experience and experiment, and they rejected the idea that a philosopher’s role is to construct a system of thought that explains everything that can be known.
James and Dewey were influenced by the utilitarian ideas of a group of British thinkers known as utilitarians, who were mainly concerned with practical outcomes and problems in everyday life. The utilitarian idea is that a person or a society’s values are most appropriately judged by their practical consequences. The utilitarians argued that a society should do whatever it takes to get the most good for its members and that it is therefore legitimate to sacrifice some individual freedom or liberty in order to achieve social welfare and peace.
Contemporary pragmatists, however, tend to disagree about the appropriateness of sacrificing individual liberty for social welfare and peace. They also disagree about what pragmatics actually is. Some pragmatists, such as Morris, believe that pragmatics is the study of the ways in which meanings are derived from and incorporated into contexts, while others, including relevance theorists, take the view that pragmatics is the study of the process by which a hearer comprehends an utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate.
Most contemporary pragmatics, whether ‘literalist’ or ‘contextualist’, seems to agree that the proper boundaries between semantics and pragmatics are largely porous. Relevance theory, for instance, defines pragmatics as the study of comprehension processes on the part of the hearer, which is quite close to the way that many pragmatists understand semantics. Moreover, most pragmatics, as it is currently practiced, involves perception and rule-following augmented by some species of ‘ampliative’ inference, such as induction or the application of Gricean maxims and principles.