Pragmatic is a subfield of linguistics that studies the ways context influences meaning. It also examines the interactions between speakers and what the speaker intends to convey to the listener. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. This field of study is very different from semantics, which focuses on the actual objects or ideas that words refer to.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that originated in the United States around 1870, and today presents a growing third alternative to analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation (the so-called classical pragmatists) included Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) who defined the view, and William James (1842-1910) who developed and popularized it. This group was also influenced by Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (1855-1916), a prominent exponent of absolute idealism, who nevertheless embraced a number of pragmatist themes.
The pragmatist tradition has undergone a period of decline since the 1970s, but in recent years it has experienced a marked revival. Richard Rorty’s bold and iconoclastic attacks on mainstream epistemology birthed a neopragmatism to which many prominent philosophers have contributed. Other pragmatists have objected to Rorty’s blithe dismissal of truth as a topic best left unaddressed, and sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity.
A key feature of pragmatism is the idea that people don’t always say what they mean, and that language is ambiguous. This makes pragmatics an important area of study for communication and misunderstandings, as well as for ethics, law, and philosophy.
It is a natural extension of this to study how people navigate ambiguity and misinterpretation through pragmatic knowledge. This is the heart of pragmatics, and it explains how we politely hedge a request, read between the lines when someone says something that is ambiguous, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation, and so on.
Contemporary pragmatics is generally centered on the theory of relevance, which emphasizes the fact that an utterance’s meaning depends partly on what other things have already been said. This has led to a split in pragmatics into far-side and near-side pragmatics, and there is a great deal of debate about the extent to which relevance theory ‘intrudes’ into semantics territory. Some philosophers argue that semantics is a discipline separate from pragmatics, while others maintain that the two are linked through a concept of contextual implicature. See this article for a discussion of this issue.
