Pragmatics studies the social dimensions of language use. It aims to understand how people convey their intentions in a given communication situation, and what strategies hearers employ to understand those intention-bearing messages. The field of pragmatics spans a broad range of disciplines and methodologies. It includes formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; speech act theory, conversational implicature and discourse analysis; acoustic and phonetic pragmatics; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; neuropragmatics; and historical pragmatics. It also intersects with other areas of philosophy, e.g. philosophical pragmatism.
The central concept of classical pragmatism is the notion that what matters most in our actions and lives are not abstract concepts such as truth, goodness or beauty, but the actual effects of those actions on people’s experiences and on others. This stance has long been influential in fields such as ethics, law and philosophy of science. It has also been the basis of many liberatory philosophies, including feminist, disability and Native American philosophy.
In the last two decades, there has been a movement to revive the philosophy of pragmatism and make it a more central part of contemporary philosophical life. This movement is sometimes referred to as the New Pragmatism. While the classic pragmatists focused their attention on the notion of linguistic meaning, the New Pragmatists have widened the scope of pragmatics to include all forms of human action and experience.
For example, the New Pragmatists have extended the notion of utterance interpretation to include not only the immediate effect of an action but its longer-term consequences and implications. They have shown how a person’s beliefs about the world and their own values can influence the effects of their actions on themselves and others. They have also argued that our values and assumptions are not fixed but can change over time, depending on the context in which we live.
The neopragmatists have also drawn inspiration from a variety of different philosophical traditions, such as Heraclitus and Wittgenstein. This has resulted in the emergence of a wide range of pragmatic research.
In experimental pragmatics, neopragmatists take the view that the task demands of an experiment are an intrinsic feature of the language processing environment. They argue that we should not strip away this critical feature of experimental pragmatics in creating theories of the phenomenon, as was the case with classic pragmatism.
The broader vision of pragmatics that the neopragmatists share, however, is still not widely held within experimental pragmatics. We too often create theories of linguistic pragmatics that do not fully recognize the implicit or explicit task demands that participants are asked to perform in our experiments. As a consequence, we fail to fully capture the omnipresent pragmatic nature of language processing and the way in which it interacts with the broader cognitive and interpersonal landscapes in which people are situated. This is a mistake. Pragmatics always matters, to varying degrees, and we must acknowledge this in our theoretical interpretations of experimental results.
