Pragmatics is the study of the contextual meaning of language. Unlike semantics, which focuses on the ‘what is said’ of an utterance, pragmatics takes into account the ‘how it is said’ and ‘what it means in the context’. It is what allows us to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines of a conversation, or navigate ambiguity in context.
The term pragmatics is derived from the Greek word for ‘practical’ (praxeia). The early forms of pragmatism focused on inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth in the sense that something is considered true only in so far as it proves helpful in inquiry and action. This led to the 1870s version of pragmatism called “American pragmatism” because most of its proponents were American philosophers, psychologists and legal writers (see Menand 1998 for a popular history).
Classical pragmatists developed their ideas as part of the larger metaphilosophical project of reconciling anti-skepticism, fallibilism and verificationism with a Quinean naturalist metaphilosophy. This gave rise to a form of epistemological relativism that many contemporary pragmatists embrace.
Other important pragmatist themes include the importance of experience as the source of knowledge, the role of the pragmatic maxim in evaluating concepts and hypotheses, and the idea that human understanding is incomplete and limited by what we can know at any given moment, but that this does not necessitate a global skeptical attitude or scientific skepticism.
Contemporary empirical pragmatics investigates the ways that speakers use language to communicate and understand each other, including the use of metaphors and figurative language, turn-taking and conversational implicatures, and how a speaker’s social and cultural context influences their utterances. It is a very active and broad field of research with implications in many areas of human communication.
The concept of pragmatics is a fundamental one for the philosophy of language, and it provides the basis of all our theories of communication. Pragmatics is a natural and powerful way to explore how people negotiate meaning in language.
In the last decade or so, a number of experimental studies have been conducted on a variety of topics in pragmatics. In general, the experiments aim to measure and describe what occurs in real-world interaction, and to provide a better foundation for theorizing about pragmatics in general. These studies have yielded a wide range of findings, ranging from the effects of idioms on semantics to how children learn to express meaning in a natural and meaningful way. Some of the more interesting findings can be found in the literature on interlanguage pragmatics, a subfield of empirical pragmatics. (See the bibliography below for references to relevant literature.) The broader context of experimental pragmatics, however, is the rich field of applied pragmatics in psychology and linguistics. This is an area of research that is growing rapidly. The societal impact of this research is potentially enormous. It may help to improve communication in diverse populations, reduce miscommunication, and promote greater understanding of each other.