Pragmatic
The main goal of pragmatics is to understand how people use language and the ways that this relates to the meanings of their utterances. It differs from semantics, which studies the rules that match up sentences with the propositions they express. It also differs from syntax, which studies the formal rules that govern the form of a sentence. Consequently, pragmatics is not really a part of grammar or semantics.
Classical pragmatists focused on the nature of inquiry, meaning and truth, though James also put pragmatism to work exploring truth in religion. Pragmatist themes have continued to attract attention in recent decades, as a philosophical movement and a field of study.
Contemporary pragmatists have a broad range of views, and their work is often categorized by the view they take on how pragmatics intersects with other philosophical domains. Relevance theorists are responsible for pragmatics moving closer to semantics, as they tend to focus on what is conveyed beyond saying itself (although they also see this as a way of ‘intruding’ on semantics). On the other hand, classical pragmatists’ progressive social ideals live on in some quarters: Cornel West advanced a prophetic pragmatism invoking a Christian and Marxian tradition, while Shannon Sullivan has made significant contributions in the arena of ‘whiteness studies’.
Other approaches to pragmatics – often called ‘philosophical pragmatics’ – are more oriented toward the nature of language and human cognition. These theorists are often inspired by phenomenological philosophers, and they see pragmatics as providing an alternative to traditional philosophical methodologies such as scholasticism and objectivism that have dominated modern philosophy.
For example, a philosophical approach known as ‘critical pragmatism’ looks to the idea of ‘implicit meaning’ that fills in the gap between what a speaker says and what they imply by their actions, words and attitudes. It draws on Mead’s analysis of self as irremediably social, and it aims to bridge the gap between theory and lived experience.
One of the great achievements of this neopragmatist movement has been to introduce a wide variety of new ideas into the study of pragmatics. In particular, scholars such as Richard Brandom have pushed pragmatics to explore issues that are not readily covered by traditional analytic pragmatics, for example the way in which different vocabularies understood pragmatically interact with each other.
The most ambitious pragmatist thinkers, however, have been those who have combined analytic pragmatics with a broader pragmatist perspective. Jurgen Habermas, for instance, brings analytic philosophers’ desire to systematically theorize language with a hermeneutic and neo-Marxian critique of the instrumentalist rationality that is rampant in the human lifeworld. His central concept of communicative action, which incorporates elements from Mead and pragmatism’s own idea of intentional action, has become an important cornerstone of the pragmatist movement in 20th century philosophy. Similarly, the work of Richard Sternberg has integrated a Sellarsian analytic philosophy with a pragmatist view of the self as irremediably social. This approach is now widely embraced by a diverse group of philosophers who seek to reconcile analytic pragmatics with a wider pragmatist framework.
