Pragmatic focuses on understanding how ideas and beliefs affect human actions. It is a philosophy that places great emphasis on human experience and the interconnectedness of knowing, acting and experience (Cambridge Dictionary).
Pragmatism has had an enormous influence in many areas of philosophical inquiry. It has become a central philosophy in areas of psychology and human behaviour. It has also been incorporated into applied fields like public administration, leadership studies and international relations, as well as being used as an approach to research methodology in the sciences.
A key principle of pragmatism is that humans interpret their experience, making knowledge and action dependent on the interpretation process. This enables a pragmatic perspective to uncover social realities in a more clear fashion than approaches that assume knowledge and behaviour exist independently of each other. The idea of pragmatics has been expanded by contemporary pragmatists to include the ways in which interpreting knowledge and behaviour affect each other, and how these processes are affected by human culture and context.
The pragmatist tradition includes a wide range of authors, each with their own distinctive style and approach to the philosophical problem at hand. This ranges from the logical analysis of Peirce and James to the more analytical and speculative work of Dewey, and the more broad-based approach of William James.
It has been suggested that neo-pragmatism is a reaction against the excessive rationalist focus of classical pragmatism, and that it is a philosophy of the ‘now’ rather than a philosophical system that attempts to provide answers to eternal questions. While this claim is disputed, neopragmatism certainly has a large following amongst philosophers.
The most significant sources of pragmatics research are listed in the table below, with a summary of their scope and the number of articles published by each author. The top 13 journals in this category are highlighted in red, with the corresponding URLs listed below the table.
In addition to the fields listed above, pragmatics is used in a variety of other areas of research such as sociology, cognitive science and linguistics. It is particularly useful in analysing how people make sense of their experiences, how they communicate and interact with others, and how cultural contexts shape communication. For example, pragmatics provides a framework for understanding the difference between literal and non-literal meaning in speech acts; how language functions in different cultures and contexts, such as politeness theory or conversational implicature; and how we manage reference in discourse. Pragmatics is also a significant area of study in linguistics and semiotics. It is a discipline that is continuously evolving. It is a very dynamic field of enquiry, and it is hoped that the list below will continue to grow over time as new research is produced. In order to do this, we have been monitoring the citations of papers on pragmatics in several databases. We have found that a number of journals are experiencing rapid growth in their citations, reflecting the increasing interest in this important area of study.