Pragmatics is the subfield of linguistics that examines the subtleties of context-dependent meaning in language. Its critical role in discourse analysis reveals the rich complexity of human communication and the many influences that shape it. The interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics lends itself to rich cross-pollination with other disciplines, allowing the field to benefit from an array of varying perspectives.
It is important to note that there are significant differences in how pragmatism is understood, both in its classical period and today. For example, it is common to distinguish between what might be called ‘near-side’ and ‘far-side’ pragmatics. The former concerns those properties of utterances that contribute to the meaning of what is said (such as ambiguity, indexicality or speech act theory), the latter concerns those that have to do with what happens beyond saying: how one manages to convey an utterance’s intended meaning, or how one negotiates with a listener’s expectations, for example by using conversational implicatures.
Despite these differences, there are still some fundamental issues that characterize pragmatics as a whole. The most enduringly influential issue is perhaps the notion of truth, which pragmatists conceive in distinctive ways that produce a particular epistemological outlook.
While pragmatism originated in discussions at the so-called Metaphysical Club, which Peirce and James attended, it quickly became a central theme in the work of a wide range of philosophers, psychologists and philosophically inclined scientists.
A core element of the pragmatist approach is the pragmatic maxim, or rule for clarifying hypotheses by tracing their implications for experience in specific situations. This approach has led pragmatists to develop a distinctive a posteriori epistemology, that has profoundly affected a broad range of areas in philosophy.
In particular, pragmatism has been a major influence in epistemology, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. It has also contributed to a wide range of social sciences, such as the philosophy of law and sociology, and has informed a number of different areas of the arts.
In the last few decades there has been a growing tendency for researchers in pragmatics to incorporate experimental data and/or use formal techniques similar to those used in semantics. This is an important development, given the fact that pragmatic judgments are extremely sensitive to context and can be misleading if not properly contextualized. This is even more true for linguistic pragmatics, where the judgments that are made are often based on small corpora of utterances from real-life conversations. For this reason, there is a strong interest in ensuring that empirical data is carefully controlled and reported. The burgeoning field of pragmatics is also a relatively new field, and so research in this area is likely to continue to evolve. It is a highly exciting and fast-growing area that promises to shed light on many interesting questions. The pragmatism research community is a diverse and vibrant community of scholars. This article is a brief introduction to some of the main ideas and issues that are central to its development.
