Pragmatics is a broad field of study in which scholars attempt to understand how people use language to achieve a variety of goals. It is an interdisciplinary science that draws from many other fields, including psychology, philosophy, psycholinguistics and sociology. There are a number of distinct pragmatic theories, such as speech act theory and the theory of conversational implicature, which differ in their focus on different aspects of meaning. For example, the theory of conversational implicature focuses on how an utterance can be used to convey information not directly stated, whereas speech act theory focuses more on how the speaker intends to elicit certain responses from the listener.
A number of scholars are currently working in the area of pragmatics, including those who are interested in formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; intercultural, clinical and experimental pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics. There is also an active debate about the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, with some arguing that semantics is the domain of conventional and literal meanings while pragmatics is concerned more with how an utterance is understood in context and by whom.
Experimental pragmatics emerged back in the 1970s when a number of psychologists, both developmental psychologists and those studying psycholinguistics, began to explore how people interpret pragmatic messages. This was a significant departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. At the time, there were some critics within linguistics and psychology who questioned whether it was possible to scientifically examine pragmatic meaning production and interpretation.
Despite the challenges of empirically investigating pragmatic meaning, scholars have made significant progress. The emergence of the new pragmatics has brought a number of important changes to the way that research is conducted in cognitive and experimental psychology. For instance, researchers now routinely measure how long it takes participants to understand various pragmatic messages. This measure is a key factor in many of the pragmatics experiments that are carried out. In addition, researchers have come to recognize that the task that a participant is given in an experiment can have profound effects on their pragmatic performance, and they must take these effects into account when interpreting their results.
There are a number of other practical issues that need to be addressed when researching pragmatics, including the question of how pragmatism fits with other philosophical traditions. For example, if one is committed to the epistemological stance of James’s pragmatism, which argues that beliefs become true based on their usefulness in inquiry and action, how does this view square with the anti-pragmatist stances of Wittgenstein, Moore and the Vienna Circle?