Pragmatic is the study of human language, communication and interaction. Unlike semantics, which studies the meaning of an utterance in a strictly literal sense, pragmatics looks beyond this and focuses on the implied meanings of an utterance. This includes things such as movements, gestures, body language and tone of voice. Pragmatics also takes into account the context in which an utterance is made and how this affects its interpretation. It is also about how we use language to convey what we really mean and how this varies depending on the people we are communicating with.
The pragmatist philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James are widely considered the founders of pragmatics. They argued that the way something works is more important than its logical form or whether it represents an absolute truth. For instance, a statement that “prayer is heard” may be true on a psychological level but it might not bring about the change you are hoping for. This is why pragmatism is not antithetical to religion but it does leave open the possibility that transcendent realities may exist.
Although pragmatism began as an epistemology, it now incorporates aspects of philosophy such as metaphysics, ethics and social theory. It is also a central philosophy in applied fields such as public administration, politics and leadership studies, political science, international relations and conflict resolution. Moreover, it has been a major philosophical influence in liberatory projects such as feminism, ecology and Native American philosophy (Alexander 2013).
One of the most common uses of pragmatics is in linguistics where it examines what people actually mean when they say something. For example, the phrase “I saw a painting that was next to a tree” could have two meanings: either it means that a painting was found by humans or it refers to the fact that the painting was placed near a tree. Pragmatics allows us to disambiguate these meanings and understand what the speaker really meant.
Pragmatics is also an essential part of cognitive behavioral therapy where we learn how to change our underlying beliefs and attitudes by practicing new behaviors. For example, we might believe that it’s ok to lie but learn that lying is not a good thing. Pragmatics also allows us to think critically about the world around us and make informed choices.
In experimental pragmatics, researchers present people with a series of stimuli, each representing a different experimental condition. They then observe how they respond to these stimuli and calculate averages of their behavior across all the conditions. This helps to capture the overall central tendencies in their performance. However, it does not tell the whole story because there are individual differences between people which cannot be captured using simple means such as averages. This is why the field of pragmatics has been criticized by some scholars as being too reliant on statistical methods to explain complex, real-world phenomena. Nonetheless, the field of pragmatics continues to be a major area of research within psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.