Pragmatic is the study of the way context contributes to meaning in language. It is a subfield of linguistics, and linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field emerged in the 1970s as psychologists, anthropologists and sociolinguists began to focus on the ways people convey and interpret utterance meaning beyond their phonetic or grammatical form. The field has been represented by the International Pragmatics Association since 1986.
Unlike the other branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics, which concentrate on studying individual sentence meaning, pragmatics studies meaning in context. It is widely recognized that most utterances convey more than just a single word or sentence meaning, and the most successful communication involves an understanding of how different contextual factors affect the interpretation of specific utterances. Pragmatics is also about the understanding of how linguistic phenomena, such as scalar implicatures, presuppositions, politeness, negation and metaphor, are used to communicate complex messages.
The development of pragmatics in the 1970s was a watershed event in human communication research, and it marked a significant departure from the traditional emphasis within developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and linguistics on lexical, syntactic and semantic processing of individual message meaning. In the 40 years since, experimental pragmatics has made great strides in its attempt to create a viable scientific discipline that can make sense of the diverse, real-world meanings that people actually understand and convey in specific contexts. But there remain several challenges.
For one, there is a need to move away from the overemphasis placed on individual participants in experimentation and to take into account that each person’s behavior and reactions are influenced by their particular history and the specific set of stimuli with which they interact. There is no such thing as a neutral, objective point of view from which to interpret an utterance, and the theory of linguistic pragmatics must acknowledge this.
A second challenge is the relative neglect of pragmatic “products” (that is, the particular meaningful interpretations that emerge from a specific context) in experimental pragmatics. There is a widespread assumption that the process of interpreting an utterance produces a unified meaning product, which can be measured by statistical techniques such as means. But this is a profoundly false and misleading assumption, and it has led to much misinterpretation of empirical results.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is reconciling the pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative with the anti-skepticism of the modern academic skeptical tradition. However, pragmatism offers a solution to this conundrum by arguing that the truth of any statement is derived from its usefulness in helping individuals struggle to achieve their goals and survive in the world. In this respect, pragmatism is the most practical approach to philosophy of mind, language, and scientific logic that has ever been proposed.
