Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. It examines the ways that speakers’ intentions and beliefs shape the interpretation of their utterances, as well as the ways that listeners use language to determine those intentions and beliefs. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy, with the scholarly community divided into a number of different pragmatic schools. These include formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; game-theoretic, clinical and experimental pragmatics and neuropragmatics; intercultural, interlinguistic and intersociocultural pragmatics and the history of pragmatics.
The term pragmatic was first used in the late 19th century to describe Peirce’s theory of meaning and inquiry, a principle that came to be known as pragmatism. This idea, which he developed during the 1870s, holds that a statement is meaningful only if it can be used to guide future behavior or improve current knowledge. It was this use of pragmatism as a principle for inquiry that gave rise to the pragmatic account of meaning that became a cornerstone of logical positivism, a school of thought that was championed by James and Dewey.
A key feature of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is that all statements – even those that are false or incoherent – are potentially useful, as long as they can generate conditional propositions about the future. For example, the statement “vinegar is diluted acetic acid” can generate conditional statements such as, “If litmus paper is dipped into it then it will turn red.”
Another aspect of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim was that it was intended to filter out metaphysical statements. He believed that the majority of metaphysical propositions have no practical bearing on reality and therefore do not make an important contribution to our overall fixed set of beliefs. As a result, these statements are not truly meaningful.
For the early pragmatists, the pragmatic maxim served as an important tool for clearing up metaphysics and aiding scientific inquiry. This led many to view the pragmatic account of meaning as a forerunner of the verificationist account of meaning championed by logical positivists.
Later pragmatists such as Mey and Korta took the idea of pragmatism in new directions. The later work of pragmatists focused on the way that context shapes the meaning of an utterance, including the fact that different cultures may have a different notion of what constitutes politeness and how it is expressed. Similarly, the later work of pragmatists explored how listeners use language to understand the context of an utterance. This includes the use of heuristics, a form of inductive reasoning, to determine what the speaker is likely to mean, and how the listener’s background, interests, and values might influence that meaning.