Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that studies the way context contributes to meaning. The field also evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, and how the interpreter and the interpreted interact. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The study of pragmatics is sometimes referred to as contextualist linguistics or pragmatics and semantics. Pragmatics is not to be confused with the philosophy of pragmatism, which is a philosophy of life and thought based on the work of Charles Peirce.
A central aspect of pragmatism is the belief that there are certain fundamental principles that govern reality, and that these principles have implications for the world around us. As a philosophical philosophy, pragmatism can be applied to fields such as psychology, ethics, education, leadership studies and research methodology. Moreover, a number of applied fields such as public administration, political science and international relations have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism into their work.
The word ‘pragmatic’ comes from the Greek verb
Many philosophers have contributed to the pragmatist movement. In particular, Charles Peirce and John Dewey were influential pragmatists. Later philosophers have included William James, Richard Rorty and other neopragmatists.
Other scholars have focused on a variety of topics, including the philosophy of mind, language, and philosophical logic. A number of philosophers, including Juergen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer, have applied pragmatism to the philosophy of science and social epistemology.
In computational pragmatics, a branch of the discipline of artificial intelligence, we use pragmatics to model and analyze how computers can communicate with humans. This is done by determining what is appropriate in a given situation and what is not. Computers can learn to improve their pragmatic performance by analyzing how humans respond to different situations and by observing how people communicate in those situations.
The field of pragmatics has a strong link to software engineering and information technology management. A business may have an IT director, or sys admin, who is responsible for the functionality of all its technology tools and processes. A sys admin is usually tasked with setting up, managing and supporting the company’s computing infrastructure.
Another important area of pragmatics is logical pragmatics, which attempts to connect classical semantics with intuitionistic semantics and the Gricean notion of illocutionary force. Some forms of logical pragmatics, such as the Relevance Theory framework developed by Noah Goodman and Michael C. Frank, can be considered as a type of near-side pragmatics because they focus on the extent to which a speaker’s intention and beliefs impact the literal meaning of an utterance. Other pragmatics, such as the Rational Speech Act framework offered by Bach and Harnish, can be considered far-side pragmatics because they focus on what is said, rather than how it is said.