Pragmatics is the study of how people use language to express and understand their intentions. It is a broad field that is central to many areas of linguistics and philosophy, including semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics and media studies. It is also closely related to the scientific discipline of natural language processing (seen as a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence), which attempts to develop computer systems that more closely approximate human language and information processing abilities, particularly with regard to ambiguity resolution.
A key feature of pragmatism is that it emphasizes the pragmatic context in which utterance interpretation takes place. This omnipresent element is a critical part of all experimental pragmatic tasks that are performed by people. As such, any theory of linguistic pragmatics that tries to supervene on the tasks that are used in experimental pragmatic research must be able to explain how the results of those tasks are influenced by the particular idiosyncratic ways in which people interpret the utterances they hear and say.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragma, meaning “purpose,” and the Greek praxis, meaning “action.” It is therefore often thought that pragmatists are simply people who are practical and purposeful in their behavior. However, the pragmatist tradition has a long history of contributions to philosophy and other disciplines beyond linguistics.
Historically, the pragmatist approach has been seen as a liberating philosophical project, a view that can provide a powerful alternative to more traditional approaches to philosophical problems. For example, the pragmatist notion of truth as something that depends on the pragmatic consequences of a claim may help to undermine problematic ‘nominalistic’ conceptions of reality that lead to copy theories of truth, Cartesian certainty-seeking strategies in epistemology and Kantian conceptualism about things ‘in themselves’.
Today, many philosophers in a variety of fields look to the pragmatist tradition for inspiration. These include liberatory philosophical projects in feminism (Seigfried 1996), ecology (Alexander 2013), Native American philosophy (Pappas 1998) and Latin American philosophy (Sadler 1994).
It is likely that the future will be marked by rich pragmatist contributions in these as well as other disciplines and social issues. In addition, the time seems ripe for scholars to fully recognize the pragmatic constraints inherent in experimental task demands and to integrate these into their theories of linguistic pragmatics. This will require a radical shift in how we think about language use, but one that is well worth pursuing if it leads to the rich understanding of experience and science that pragmatists have promised. For more on this, see the entry for pragmatism in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
