Pragmatic focuses on how language is used in particular contexts and involves attention to speakers’ intentions, actions, and the specific circumstances of their communication. There are many different pragmatic theories, including conversational implicature, speech act theory, and others, but they all involve the same basic questions: How do people manage to communicate in a way that is both effective and accurate, despite the limitations of the medium? How does meaning change from one context to another, based on the conventions of that context and on what is already known about the participants in the conversation?
Pragmatism has a wide and varied history. It has attracted many philosophers, from Charles Peirce to John Dewey and G. H. Mead, and is still cited in the academy today. It has also been a source of controversy, both in terms of its interpretations and its consequences for philosophy.
In general, pragmatists emphasize the importance of experience and the need for philosophical inquiry to be practical. They believe that there are certain facts that we cannot ignore, and that the truth is something that can be verified through experience and experimentation. In addition, pragmatists tend to view knowledge as a product of social interaction and that the truth is only as good as it is accessible and understandable.
The main figure in the classical pragmatist pantheon is John Dewey (1859-1952), who had considerable impact on American intellectual life for a half-century, particularly during his decade at the University of Chicago. He had numerous disciples and imitators, but once he was gone pragmatism lost much of its momentum. This did not, however, mean that pragmatism was dead; a few pragmatists (including C. I. Lewis and Sidney Hook) remained active, and there was a nascent movement towards that self-consciously rigorous import from Europe called analytic philosophy.
A central concern of pragmatism is the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. The distinction is a porous one: Semantics concerns the significance conventionally or literally attached to words, and pragmatics, roughly speaking, seeks out more substantial significance by working out general principles in the light of contextual information.
The study of semantics and pragmatics is therefore a wide-ranging and complex endeavor. It is populated by many subfields, including formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; intercultural, clinical and experimental pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics.
Pragmatic skills are essential for communication and can be taught in the classroom. This month’s Teacher’s Corner explains why pragmatics should be an important part of language instruction, and provides resources for teaching and assessing pragmatic skills. Try EverydaySpeech free for a month and get access to our pragmatic assessments, lesson plans, and other tools. Start your free trial today!
