Pragmatic is the study of language use that goes beyond words, focusing on the context in which they are used. It is an essential aspect of discourse analysis and is a key component in understanding how people communicate. In this article, we explore several reasons why pragmatics is important to linguistic analysis.
Pragmatists believe that the most meaningful and valid philosophical theories are those that are useful for predicting how humans actually behave in real-world situations. This is in contrast to traditional analytic and continental philosophical traditions that tend to focus on concepts like truth and value in isolation from the way in which they are applied. Pragmatism is a philosophy that has many applications in various areas, including science and business.
In the late 1800s, pragmatism emerged as an alternative to both analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Its first generation included Charles Sanders Peirce, who defined the theory, and his Harvard colleague William James, who popularised it. These pragmatists were deeply influenced by the scientific revolution of evolutionary theory, and their work explored themes such as inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth.
The second generation of pragmatists focused more explicitly on politics, education and other dimensions of social improvement. This included the social work pioneer Jane Addams, whose ideas helped to shape the profession of social work, and new philosophies of race, developed by W.E.B Du Bois and Alain Locke. It is in these areas that pragmatists have made their most profound contributions.
More recently, pragmatism has become a significant influence on contemporary philosophers and scientists, with the likes of Hilary Putnam advocating for the prospect of a ‘pragmatist enlightenment’. He argues that pragmatism offers an antidote to philosophical skepticism, a willingness to embrace fallibilism and the rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body and analytic/synthetic.
Pragmatics is an important part of linguistic analysis because it allows us to see the full range of what people are trying to achieve through their speech. It also enables us to understand the ways in which speakers and listeners try to navigate the often complex situations that they find themselves in.
For example, if you go to the pub with friends and decide to split the bill, being pragmatic means that rather than spending time debating how much each person should pay, you simply get the check, look at what everyone had and divide accordingly. This approach is less annoying to everybody involved and makes the process more efficient.
In general, pragmatics is concerned with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of human communication, while semantics focuses on the meanings of individual words and syntactic studies explore the relationships between these. However, in practice, the study of pragmatics is more like a circle: all linguistic analysis is pragmatic and all language use is contextual, so any account of pragmatics must take these features into account. This is why experimental pragmatics is so crucial to linguistic analysis. Without it, we would be unable to make sense of how human beings understand and use their language in context.
