Pragmatics is the study of language in context and the way that the meaning of an utterance depends on its context of use. It is a subfield of the philosophy of language and a discipline within linguistics, cognitive science and psycholinguistics. Pragmatics includes the theory of how the same utterance can be understood to express different propositions in different contexts, and of how the meaning of an utterance may vary between speakers, between cultures, or over time. It also includes theories of ambiguity and vagueness, reference, indexicals and demonstratives, speech act theory, and conversational implicature.
The vast literature on pragmatics has produced a multitude of ideas and insights. However, it is not always easy to synthesize this knowledge, especially when there are profound variations in experimental outcomes across studies (e.g., the so-called replication crisis). Such variations may stem from many sources including differences in experiment design, sample size, participants and the way they are recruited, and from contextual influences that are not fully accounted for by standard pragmatic theory.
Moreover, there are also within-individual differences that can affect people’s performances in experimental situations. These within-person differences are not captured by conventional descriptive statistics such as means, which compute the average of all people’s responses to all the stimuli presented in a particular experimental condition. Instead, more attention is needed on designing experimental situations that can systematically investigate the specific pragmatic meanings people really infer, as well as their esthetic and emotional responses to these inferences, in their own specific contexts of use.
In addition, the concept of pragmatics needs to be reclaimed from a primarily theoretical framework and made more central to applied research. This can be done by incorporating the three selected pragmatic principles at every step of the research process, from designing and data collection to analysis and dissemination. The article outlines how this was done in the case of two projects whose aim was to explore and evaluate NGO processes and practices.
A key practical pragmatic principle that informed this approach is the Deweyan notion of inquiry and its relationship to everyday life. It is based on the principle that all human actions are inquiries or assessments of their environment and their possible implications for the individual in question. Such inquiry and assessment are often unconscious but can also be self-conscious and are linked to adaptive behaviour.
Consequently, the application of pragmatism to research on NGO processes and practices is an ongoing, iterative and reflective endeavour that requires a flexible yet rigorous approach. The article discusses how the chosen pragmatic principles were incorporated throughout the project examples to enable this flexibility, without disadvantaging either the integrity or the robustness of the findings. The goal is to provide other researchers with a clear outline of how to navigate pragmatic research and thus contribute to the advancement of applied research in this important field.