A pragmatic person prioritizes practical considerations in decision-making, focusing on results and effectiveness rather than ideals or abstract principles. A four-year-old who wants a unicorn for her birthday is probably not being very pragmatic.
Pragmatics is a research field within the wider disciplines of psychology, psycholinguistics and linguistics. It is concerned with the use of language in real-world settings and how we understand others’ meanings in their utterances. It is also concerned with how people communicate across cultures and how language usage varies over time.
Experimental pragmatics emerged in the 1970s when researchers from several fields including developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience began to explore how we interpret other people’s utterances. This was a radical departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical and syntactic processing of individual sentence meaning. This new focus on pragmatics was met with considerable resistance from some scholars who argued that there was little if any empirical justification for this shift in research direction.
In the experimental pragmatics literature, researchers attempt to capture the ‘native’ context of utterance interpretation by presenting participants with a wide range of implicit or explicit tasks and then measuring their behavioral responses to these stimuli. This research methodology is extremely complex and the resulting findings are often inconsistent. Some studies have even failed to replicate other researchers’ results (the so-called ‘replication crisis’). This variation is largely caused by the complex interaction between different factors, such as a participant’s background experience and the implicit or explicit task demands of the experiment.
While the failure to replicate has highlighted some of the challenges that lie at the heart of experimental pragmatics, there are other reasons why it is difficult to draw generalized conclusions from this research. In particular, the fact that experimental pragmatics is a young field means that it is not yet well established how experimental procedures should be conducted. This lack of established practice has the potential to undermine the trustworthiness of research in this area.
The central feature of pragmatism is that the researcher needs to consider the context in which they are working and the implications this will have for their investigative strategy. This perspective allows for flexibility and enables researchers to take into account the evolving nature of their respondent’s experiences, actions and beliefs throughout the research process.
Specifically, a pragmatist approach will consider the interconnectedness of experience, knowing and action, allowing for the possibility that change can be experienced as a ‘fluid’ phenomenon that is influenced by various social and environmental factors (Morgan 2014a).
Pragmatism therefore provides an excellent framework with which to navigate qualitative applied research on NGO processes, enabling researchers to explore how these are impacted by the wider context in which their respondents work. This in turn can shape the research agenda and orient it towards the generation of actionable knowledge. As the two project examples shown below demonstrate, an iterative pragmatist approach to research enables this to be achieved through the inclusion of a flexible, qualitative methodology which combines participant observation with interviews and other data collection techniques.