Pragmatics is a branch of philosophy and linguistics that explores the contextual meaning of language. It attempts to explain how a word may have more than one meaning, depending on the context in which it is used. Pragmatics is often seen as a middle ground between analytic and continental philosophy, and it has attracted many important thinkers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
The idea behind pragmatism is that people make decisions in the best way they can, taking all available options into account. The philosopher John Dewey was heavily influenced by pragmatic ideas, and his ideas led to new philosophies of education and social improvement. Similarly, pioneering African-American pragmatists W. E. B Du Bois and Jane Addams incorporated pragmatism into their social work ideologies, forming the foundation for the American welfare state.
There are different approaches to pragmatics, which are classified by their focus on discipline and philosophical tendencies. Some pragmaticists see the discipline as a philosophy, following Grice’s approach; others focus on the interaction between semantics and syntax; while some see it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.
In the 1970s, experimental pragmatics began to emerge as psychologists and linguists started to look more closely at people’s understanding of language in real-world interactions. These researchers tried to understand what it is about a person’s intention that makes their words meaningful to their audience, and they went beyond the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. A few critics within linguistics and psychology, however, have been skeptical of the scientific value of pragmatic research. One popular refrain was that ‘pragmatics is the wastebasket of linguistics’.
The main issues that are explored by pragmatics are the theory of how a statement can be understood in different ways by different audiences, the role of ambiguity and indexicality in speech acts, and the theory of conversational implicatures. In addition, the discipline studies the consequences of different ways of interpreting an utterance, and it tries to analyze the ways that speakers are guided by practical considerations in choosing their language.
A key issue for contemporary pragmatics is the fuzziness of the line between semantics and pragmatics. For example, the dictionary entry for pragmatics states that “Semantics deals with the relation of signs to the objects which they may or do denote; pragmatics relates the function of signs to their interpreters.” However, many scholars have drawn a clearer line, placing semantics on the far side of the line and pragmatics on the near side, with a clear idea of the role of pragmatic intrusion in the determination of what is meant.
The field of pragmatics is broad, and there are many subfields that exist in order to address different aspects of this topic. There are formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; intercultural, clinical, and experimental pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics. The main goal of pragmatics is to understand the real-world usage of language, and the complexities of human communication.
