Pragmatics is a philosophy of language that examines how words are used in a given situation and how they relate to the specific circumstances of their utterance. Pragmatics also looks at the speaker’s intentions and actions, as well as the strategies hearers use to determine what is being communicated in a particular context. This is a broad and varied discipline that includes the theory of ambiguity, indexicality, conversational implicature, speech act theory, and many other theories.
The philosophical roots of pragmatics can be traced back to the works of a number of important philosophers including Peirce, James, Wittgenstein, and Dewey. In the early part of the 20th century, pragmatism experienced a brief but important revival as an approach to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. In addition, pragmatism has made significant contributions to such areas as philosophy of religion, law, and art.
Although pragmatism has a broad range of applications, it is often thought to be most closely associated with the philosophy of inquiry and the theory of truth. Specifically, it promotes a flexible and adaptive approach to life that prioritizes results and effectiveness over theoretical ideals or abstract principles. People who are pragmatic tend to be focused on what actually works in real-world scenarios and are willing to compromise when necessary to achieve their goals.
The central notion of pragmatism is the concept of pragmatic maxims, which are rules for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses and determining whether they have any implications for our practice. These maxims are based on the premise that we can only know something if it has consequences for our behaviour, and thus they serve to make epistemological claims less vulnerable to a priori metaphysics. In this way, pragmatism provides a mechanism for settling disputed concepts and theories by showing that they have no practical difference in the ways they affect our lives.
As Peirce saw it, pragmatism could be seen as a tool for settling disputes that might otherwise have become interminable. He presented it as a method or principle for establishing the emptiness of a priori metaphysics, and he encouraged his colleagues at a so-called metaphysical club to apply pragmatism to the problems they were wrestling with (Menand 1998).
While Peirce’s pragmatist maxims continue to live on in the pragmatics field, a number of different philosophical traditions have adopted pragmatism as their own approach to certain issues. For example, Hilary Putnam argues that a philosophical approach to the problem of truth would be best served by a pragmatist framework, and he offers a series of practical maxims for addressing such issues as fallibilism, objectivity, and the relationship between facts and values (Putnam 2004). A variety of liberatory social projects in areas like philosophy of race (Cornel West 1989), philosophy of disability (Hester and Keith 2013), ecology (Kirk 2003), and medical ethics have looked to pragmatism for inspiration and guidance (McDonald 2014). These developments show how the original pragmatist ideas about reality and epistemology continue to resonate today.
