Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy that studies how context contributes to meaning. It is an important part of the theory of natural language, and is an essential element in the philosophy of communication. It includes the study of ambiguity, indexicality, and speech act theory. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics is often considered a third alternative to traditional analytic and continental philosophy, though it has also been criticized as a neo-positivist ideology that tries to justify political power by appealing to science.
The core of pragmatics is that the meaning of words is not simply a matter of the convention or literal sense that they have in isolated utterances, but rather is a function of the speaker’s intentions and beliefs, the specific circumstances of their utterance, what they intend to accomplish, and how well they manage to communicate all of this. The aim of pragmatics is to understand and explain how speakers use their language in order to achieve their goals, whether these goals are linguistic or non-linguistic.
This is why it is so difficult to give a precise definition of ‘pragmatic’: the concept changes with the situation, as does what is meaningful to speak about, and so what works in one context may not work in another. The field is vast and varied, spanning many subfields of linguistics, as well as various areas of philosophy and the social sciences: there are formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; game-theoretical, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics; and so on.
While pragmatism has been most prominent in North America, it is now a worldwide phenomenon with vibrant research networks in South America, Scandinavia and more recently central Europe and China. Pragmatism offers a promising approach to some fundamental problems of the modern world and has the potential to provide a rich understanding of experience and science.
The earliest philosophical pragmatists were Charles Sanders Peirce and his Harvard colleague William James, who both developed their own distinctive forms of pragmatism. Later, John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy developed out of his collaboration with pragmatists such as Royce and Josiah Davidson.
Contemporary pragmatist philosophers have a wide range of approaches, which are generally classified by their view of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Some, known as ‘literalists’, think that semantics is autonomous with little or no pragmatic intrusion, while others, like Peirce and James, take a more contextualist view.
A more recent development is neo-pragmatism, which has taken the form of a metaphilosophy and philosophy of language. It draws on, but is not limited to, the broader phenomenology of Peirce and James. It also differs in some ways from earlier pragmatic theories of truth, because it reframes the notion of truth in terms of ideal warranted assertibility (see Goodman 2013 for discussion). However, Putnam has argued that this is an inadequate account of truth and proposes instead a more modest but more robust account of the pragmatics of truth, which is closer to Dewey’s than to Peirce’s.
