Pragmatics is a broad philosophical discipline that studies how language, in particular conversational discourse, functions to convey meaning and achieve social actions. It provides tools to delve into the subtleties of communication, including politeness strategies, turn-taking, topic management, and repair mechanisms. It is also useful for examining how people negotiate social relationships, express and contest power dynamics, and foster solidarity in interactions.
It is a third alternative to traditional analytic and continental philosophical traditions, with its origins in the United States. A first generation of pragmatists was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James. A second generation turned pragmatism into a philosophy of action and education, inspired by the likes of Jane Addams and John Dewey.
In the twentieth century, a number of new developments gave the pragmatic movement a boost. The work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge, for example (Ramsey 1926) developed Peirce’s views on statistical reasoning and inquiry in ways that encouraged fertile new research programmes (Misak 2018). Wittgenstein’s later thought acquired a pragmatist flavour through conversations with Ramsey and his reading of James. And, more recently, Hilary Putnam has made ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist enlightenment (Putnam 2004).
The central idea behind pragmatism is that beliefs only qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in their struggle with reality. This is a radically different view of truth from the one held by classical philosophers such as Descartes and Aristotle who thought that only those beliefs which could be proven to be true were valid. A further tenet is that experience and practical reason play a key role in the acquisition of knowledge.
Many of the central ideas of pragmatism have been applied to other disciplines, particularly in sociology and psychology. For example, the field of discourse analysis has been greatly enhanced by a pragmatic approach to meaning, as demonstrated in the study of conversational politeness strategies, turn-taking, and repair mechanisms. This understanding of the pragmatic elements of linguistic expressions has provided important insights into the ways in which we construct a sense of reality and the social world around us.
In addition, pragmatics has helped to make the connection between thinking and doing more explicit in the fields of public administration, political science, leadership studies, international relations, conflict resolution and research methodology. Many of these fields have drawn inspiration from the pragmatists’ rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body, analytic/synthetic and more generally their emphasis on the primacy of practice.