Pragmatics is the study of language use in a specific context. It is about what is said, when it is said and how it is said.
Its central tenets are that meaning is created by actions and that knowledge is based on experiences (i.e., inference). The pragmatists also assert that there is no such thing as a universal or objective truth and that it is therefore impossible to prove anything definitively. Instead, pragmatism holds that what is true is what works. This is not to say that pragmatists are pessimistic, but rather that they seek real-world solutions to pragmatic problems rather than abstract philosophical questions.
A down-to-earth pragmatist might argue that bickering metaphysicians should get into the habit of posing the question: “What difference would it make in people’s lives, or in the world, if my theory were true and its rival(s) false?”
The first self-consciously pragmatist philosophers were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a logician, mathematician, scientist, and polymath; John Dewey (1859-1952), a Harvard-educated educator, psychologist, and philosopher; and James E. Miller (1842-1910), a lawyer, jurist, and moralist with a medical degree. This trio of thinkers, along with the philosopher William James, formulated a philosophy that was influential for a half-century.
Contemporary pragmatic scholars tend to fall into two camps: those who view linguistic pragmatics as a subset of semantics and those who see it as an independent area of inquiry. The former view ascribes all utterance meaning to semantics; the latter regard pragmatics as a sort of boundary between semantics and those parts of semantics that are affected by context dependence. Both approaches have their merits, and researchers in experimental pragmatics must keep these distinctions in mind.
There is, however, much experimental evidence showing that pragmatics matters a great deal, at all stages of utterance processing, and that it influences the interpretation of other aspects of utterance meaning. For example, studies of the speed with which people understand irony show that pragmatic knowledge plays a role (e.g., Gibbs and Colston 2007; Ivanko and Pexman 2003).
A pragmatist approach is one that recognizes that the interplay of contextual features can be very complex and reflects multiple influences on people’s adaptive behaviors. Therefore, a pragmatist view of pragmatics requires that researchers fully acknowledge and account for these influences in their experiments. Otherwise, their research may well miss the point of pragmatism entirely. This is a lesson that many experimental pragmaticists have yet to learn. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. As a result, many researchers are now paying greater attention to the dynamic interplay between semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development of a variety of new pragmatics. These include formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; game-theoretic, clinical, and neuropragmatics; and sociocultural and interlinguistic pragmatics. Pragmatics is an extremely broad and varied field. It is therefore difficult to provide a neat list of articles or essential pragmatist tenets. Nonetheless, there are some themes and theses that have loomed large for pragmatists.