Pragmatic is a philosophy and a field of study that attempts to understand the nature of language, how people use it, and what they manage to communicate. It deals with the context of communication and its consequences, the meanings that speakers attach to utterances, the specific circumstances that arise in the course of communication, and the linguistic strategies that speakers employ to convey what they want to say.
There are many different ways to approach pragmatics, and the discipline continues to grow. One way is to view it as a form of applied philosophy, using the principles of pragmatism to guide the research and practical decisions that are made in many areas of human activity. The other way is to view it as a scientific discipline, using the tools and methods of science to understand how people use language in everyday communication. This is the perspective taken by most linguists and experimental pragmatics researchers.
Philosophically, pragmatism is an anti-metaphysical position that rejects both absolutist idealism and skepticism. It argues that only the ‘practical differences’ that actually matter are real and valid, and thus that metaphysical disputes are useless unless they can be settled in terms of those practical differences. In the case of capitalism and socialism, for example, a debate about which is’more true’ becomes irrelevant if we can point to the fact that people who live in one system have a better life than those living in the other.
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term ‘pragmatism’ in 1870, and his ideas spread through the work of his students and followers, notably William James. He and his heirs have argued that pragmatism provides a third alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions, offering a solution to the old metaphysical impasses of truth/value, mind/body, and analytic/synthetic.
As a philosophy, pragmatism is primarily concerned with inquiry and the concept of truth, although it also has major contributions in the areas of ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and politics. Its influence has been especially strong in the United States, where it helped to fuel a scientific revolution at the time of evolutionary theory.
In the field of experimental pragmatics, there are several challenges that must be faced when conducting studies on language use in real-life situations. First, researchers need to fully acknowledge the particular people and explicit or implicit tasks that they ask participants to perform in their experiments. There is no neutral point of view from which utterance interpretation can begin, and there is no context-free, task-free environment in which linguistic processing unfolds to produce pragmatic meanings. This omnipresent pragmatic constraint must be acknowledged and systematically investigated in all experimental pragmatic studies.
Experimental pragmatics has made a significant contribution to our understanding of how people use language in their everyday lives. It is a highly interdisciplinary field, with close connections to neighbouring research fields such as semantics, discourse analysis and conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, and interactional anthropology, as well as psychology and the philosophy of language. It is an important part of the interdisciplinary cognitive science research agenda, and is constantly expanding.