Having good pragmatic knowledge is essential for connecting with others, making socially appropriate choices and successfully navigating different situations. Pragmatic knowledge is what allows you to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation, and navigate the ambiguity that is ubiquitous in everyday language.
The field of Pragmatics is devoted to the study of meaning in context: meaning that is not strictly literal. People use a variety of pragmatic strategies to express themselves and make sense of the world around them. These strategies allow them to do things like politely hedge a request, cleverly reading between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms and navigate ambiguity in context.
Pragmatism is a philosophical viewpoint founded in the United States around 1870. It currently presents a growing third alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions worldwide. Historically, the key ideas in pragmatism were first developed in discussions of the so-called Metaphysical Club that took place in Harvard during the 1870s and notably in publications by Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James. These pragmatist ideas were heavily influenced by the scientific revolution that was then taking place around evolutionary theory.
A key idea in pragmatism is that there are many ways of doing something and that all of these ways are equally legitimate. This means that people can draw scalar implicatures, infer irony and understand novel metaphors just as well as they can answer questions literally and respond to a direct question with a yes or no.
Another idea in pragmatism is that reality is always a mixed bag and that there are often trade-offs between competing goals, values, and interests. This means that a person can be both realistic and idealistic at the same time. This also implies that someone can compromise in some circumstances and stick to their principles in other circumstances.
Lastly, a key idea in pragmatism is the concept of pragmatic value. This is the notion that a person’s actions have pragmatic value in the sense that they contribute to the achievement of some goal or other. This idea is closely related to the ethical doctrine of utilitarianism.
In experimental pragmatics, scholars often conduct experiments that manipulate independent variables to see how they affect people’s behaviors. To capture some of the central tendencies in these outcomes, it is common to compute averages across the various independent variables. However, this approach overlooks the possibility that the independent variables may themselves have pragmatic implications and influence the way in which people perform a given task. This is called the pragmatic constraint and it is why researchers need to be aware of this issue when conducting experimental pragmatics studies. In this way, it is important to think of pragmatics as a continuously operating system with dynamic influences from both the broader environment and the particular experimental tasks. This is a more realistic and robust way to think about pragmatics than simply as a temporally isolated inferential process.