Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning in language. It is about interpreting what speakers mean when they use words in particular contexts, including things like culture, social norms, and the specific circumstances of utterance. The mastery of pragmatic rules is critical to effective communication because it helps to bridge potential gaps between speakers and listeners. It is also important for understanding intercultural communication. For example, what might be considered polite in one culture may not be perceived as polite in another, and vice versa. Pragmatics allows us to bridge these cultural gaps by providing a common set of principles for interpreting linguistic behavior.
The word “pragmatic” is derived from a Greek word meaning, roughly, “practical.” The philosophical tradition associated with pragmatism started with the Metaphysical Club, an informal group of Harvard-educated men who met for informal discussions about philosophy in the 1870s. The members included the proto-positivist Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and two of the first self-consciously pragmatist philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce, an American logician and mathematician, and William James, a psychologist and moralist with a medical degree. These early pragmatists were not just interested in how to live well, but they also hoped to understand the nature of human knowledge and what role it might play in the world.
Despite the initial interest in pragmatics, most mainstream analytic philosophers ignored it until the 1980s. However, since that time there has been a revival of the field, led by people such as Nelson Goodman, Richard Morris, and Wilfrid Sellars, who have developed various interpretations of the pragmatist legacy. There is no agreed-upon pragmatist creed; rather, pragmatism has become a diverse and broad family of philosophical approaches.
Although pragmatics is a vast and diverse field, there are some general lines of thought that run through the contemporary literature. These include a commitment to an account of meaning that takes into consideration both the specifics of the speaker’s intended message and the circumstances in which it is conveyed; a belief that language is essentially social; and an appreciation for the importance of context in determining how an utterance will be understood.
Experimental pragmatics, which emerged in the 1970s, is a subfield of psychology that seeks to scientifically examine the production and interpretation of pragmatic meaning. This is a notable departure from the traditional focus in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of sentence meaning. Early on, some critics in linguistics and psychology were skeptical about the possibility of pragmatic research.
Currently, there is considerable discussion about the need for more systematic replication of pragmatics experiments. This is a broader issue in psychology and other disciplines, known as the “replication crisis.” Failures to replicate can cast serious doubt on the validity of certain experimental findings. In the case of pragmatics, the replication problem is particularly vexing because of the interplay between individual and group effects, as well as within-individual differences in how people produce and interpret pragmatic meaning.