Pragmatics is a field that aims to answer the questions: What do people mean when they use language? How does this relate to what they say and how they behave? How do they manage to communicate what they want and need?
This is a very broad and challenging set of questions, so it is no surprise that the experimental literature on pragmatics tends to be somewhat disjointed. As a result, the studies that are reported in the scientific journals often offer contradictory results, and the scholarly community is currently engaged in what some have called a “replication crisis” (Shrout and Rodgers, 2022). The resulting tensions have led to the development of a number of different approaches for addressing the challenges of pragmatics research.
One approach is to try to capture some general tendencies in people’s pragmatic performance by analyzing averages over many individual participants’ responses to a variety of experimental conditions. By doing this, the hope is to identify the most important factors that influence the way people behave pragmatically. Taking this approach involves attempting to reduce the effects of individual differences, but it can be difficult to do so in practice.
Another approach is to view pragmatics as a holistic set of interactive influences that affects people’s adaptive behavior across a wide range of social, cultural, and interpersonal contexts. This view of pragmatics is sometimes called contextualist or naturalistic pragmatics and it differs from the classical pragmatist position that sees pragmatics as an inferential process that occurs at a particular moment during real-life language use.
Regardless of how pragmatics is viewed, the central theme is that it is something that people do, not just that they know about it. This knowledge is what allows them to do things like politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation, or navigate ambiguity in context. It is also what makes it possible for them to be understood by other people, even if their understanding of the underlying meanings is not identical.
Pragmatism arose in the United States around 1870 and presents a growing third alternative to analytic and Continental philosophy worldwide. Its first generation pragmatists were Charles Sanders Peirce and his friend and colleague William James, who articulated a broad theory of pragmatics that can be seen as a bridge between analytic philosophies of truth and Continental ideas about the nature of inquiry, meaning, and truth itself. In a series of lectures on ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking’, James described a fundamental and apparently irresolvable clash between two ways of thinking that he promised that his own pragmatic philosophy could reconcile.