Pragmatic is a word that refers to choices made with real world consequences in mind. It is a word that contrasts with idealistic, which focuses on high principles and ideals.
For example, someone may be pragmatic when deciding to settle a lawsuit because they realize that it will cost less to pay their creditor than to fight the case. A political leader might also be pragmatic by choosing a course of action that is more likely to win the election than one that will alienate voters. This type of pragmatic approach is often described as taking the “middle ground.”
While semantics focuses on the meanings or ideas to which a word refers, syntax (or syntactic theory) explores relationships among words and their grammatical structure. Pragmatics examines the intentions of speakers and the ways that these intentions are conveyed in a message. Pragmatics is an important part of understanding how people use language.
The field of Pragmatics is an interdisciplinary one that draws on many fields in order to better understand the nuances of human communication. Linguists, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers all contribute to this area of study. In recent years, however, it seems that the field has become somewhat splintered. This is due to a number of factors, some related to methodology and others related to philosophical orientations. For instance, some linguists are now divided into two camps: those who think that semantics is relatively autonomous and free of pragmatic intrusions and those who embrace the basic outlines of Relevance Theory, but deny its psychological orientation and view it as a sociological discipline.
In practice, experimental pragmatics focuses on people’s language processing abilities by asking participants to perform a variety of different tasks. This is a critical aspect of pragmatics, yet scholars too often strip away this information when constructing theories of linguistic pragmatics. In the process, they lose sight of the fact that people’s utterance interpretation is always task-specific both within and outside of experimental studies.
As such, experimental pragmatics should be more careful to examine the individuals who participate in experiments and the specific tasks they are asked to perform. By doing so, it should also be more able to identify the many bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that affect human meaning making. This alternative vision of experimental pragmatics would make it more possible for scholars to characterize the unique role that pragmatism plays in language use and understanding. This is a crucial step toward overcoming the challenges that plague pragmatics in our current cognitive science paradigm.