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Pragmatics and Communication

Pragmatics is the study of communication. It includes all aspects of language use and social interaction that allow us to communicate our intentions in the real world. In addition, it involves the interpretation of our interlocutors’ intentions. This interaction is a vital part of our ability to communicate in many different contexts. It is therefore essential for our survival and our social cohesion.

Pragmatism is a philosophy that originated in the United States around 1870. It provides a growing third alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. It was influenced by the scientific revolution taking place at that time, such as evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics, of which James was a keen observer and participant.

A key aspect of pragmatism is that it is based on experience. It is a hypothesis-testing epistemology that provides a pragmatic rationality for human cognition, rather than on pure, abstract principles derived from metaphysics. Pragmatism also advocates that truth and knowledge are not a priori logically necessary.

This epistemology is often viewed as a rationalist version of existentialism.

However, pragmatism has its own problems. For example, it fails to adequately address the problem of the indeterminacy of meaning. This is important because meanings are constantly changing in response to environmental and social factors. For this reason, pragmatism collapses when it comes to ethics and morality, because the criteria for what is meaningful and what is not are incredibly subjective.

In addition, pragmatism has its own specific issues within the behavioral sciences. The experimental literature on pragmatics has been plagued by enormous within-individual variation in people’s performance. As a result, it has been difficult to find consistent and convincing experimental results. This has contributed to the current state of a crisis in the psychological sciences, often referred to as the replication crisis. This has led to a greater emphasis on finding and publishing exact empirical standards for replication and on more sophisticated ways of assessing and reporting experimental results (e.g., statistical significance).

Nevertheless, the vast research literature on pragmatics has continued to flourish. In particular, psycholinguists have found great inspiration and testable hypotheses in the works of pragmatist philosophers and linguists. The field has also become increasingly interdisciplinary, with collaborations between psychologists and anthropologists as well as linguists and philosophers.

As we move into the future, the work on pragmatics will need to continue to focus on developing precise, theoretically motivated connections between pragmatic mechanisms on the one hand, and the semantic and cognitive mechanisms that underlie individual phenomena and the tasks used to measure them on the other. In addition, there will need to be more emphasis on describing the dynamic environment in which pragmatics operates as well as its effects. This will help us better understand the nature of pragmatic behavior. We hope that the contributions of this special issue will further these efforts.