Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a philosophical movement that deals with the meaning of the things people say. Pragmatics is an ethical and philosophical idea that started in the late nineteenth century. Some of the most important philosophers who developed pragmatics were William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey. Pragmatics has important implications well beyond ethics and philosophy in fields such as linguistics and journalism.

Background

When speaking, people use words and sentences to encode ideas and send them to other people. The recipients of these messages have to decode the meaning. This encoding and decoding is communicating. Language has helped people send messages to one another for millennia. Philosophers have studied this encoding and decoding. Often, people structure their words and sentences in precise ways to deliver specific messages. Sometimes, however, a sender means something different from what the message literally means. For instance, a person walks outside when it is rainy, dark, and cloudy. The person says, "Wow, this weather is just great!" The person might mean that she enjoys rainy, gloomy weather. Or, she might be using sarcasm to send a message that means the opposite of the words she is saying. Pragmatics studies the ways people send messages and the motivation behind those messages. The way people use language, the places where people use language, the backgrounds of people who use language, and many other factors affect pragmatics.

Overview

Pragmatics is concerned with many different aspects of communication and sending messages. One aspect that pragmatics deals with is the place where the communication takes place. For example, a message sent in a courtroom may have a different meaning or different implications than the same message sent on a sidewalk. Another aspect it deals with is the background of people involved in the communication. People who have different life experiences, different upbringings, and different cultures may send and receive messages in different ways. It also involves the meaning and intention of the messages that are sent. People can send the same message with different intentions. For instance, a child might say something insulting about another person's appearance. The child did not intend their statement to be rude. They were intending only to state a fact as he saw it. However, an adult could send the same message and have the intention of being rude or cruel.

Far-side pragmatics deals with issues of language beyond what is literally said. For example, a parent might tell their child "maybe." The parent might actually know they mean "no," but they use the word maybe to achieve a certain result (e.g., stop their child from being upset by the word no). The meaning of the maybe in this situation is not the same thing as the literal meaning of the word. Far-side pragmatics attempts to understand and study these meanings that go beyond the literal meaning of the words that are said and the utterances that are made.

Near-side pragmatics is more related to semantics than far-side pragmatics. Pragmatics, in general, is seen as different from semantics. Semantics is the study of the meaning of what exact meaning is being expressed by language when it is formed using specific rules. Near-side pragmatics involves ideas about how words and utterances themselves develop the meaning of what is being communicated. The words, their order, and their arrangement all influence the meaning of a message. Near-side pragmatics, however, does differ from semantics in that the same words can mean two different things. For example, if Person A says, "I am hungry," this sentence means something different from when Person B says, "I am hungry." Both sentences have the same semantics, but they have different meanings because two different people are saying them.

As an ethical and philosophical theory, pragmatics was developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the most important philosophers in the development of theory were William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey. C. S. Peirce was a polymath and great American thinker. He was one of the earliest proponents of pragmatics. He was friends with William James, who also became an important thinker in the pragmatics movement. Peirce was also a teacher to John Dewey, who became one of the most important thinkers in early pragmatics. These three Americans helped make pragmatics one of the most important contributions America made to philosophy during the twentieth century.

After the late 1800s and early 1900s, the field continued to advance. British philosopher John Langshaw Austin was interested in far-side pragmatics. He made important contributions to the field, mostly in the 1950s. He was especially interested in the distinction between what he called constatives and performatives, which were types of speech acts. Constatives were statements that were merely true or false. Yet, performatives were statements that caused an action. For example, a person reciting an oath of office does so to take a certain job or position. The oath is not merely a statement that is true or false; instead, it is a statement that is changing that person's situation. These two types of speech acts can sometimes be difficult to differentiate.

Another philosopher, Herbert Paul Grice, made important contributions to the field in the second half of the twentieth century. Grice was interested in the implications of language. He focused a great deal on language that literally meant one thing, but that was meant to imply something else. For example, Person A is talking to Person B. Person A asks about the well-being of shared acquaintance Person C. Person B says, "She seems to enjoy college. She hasn't even failed a class yet." The second part of this statement is a statement of fact. At the time of the conversation, Person C has not failed a college class. Yet, this utterance is most likely meant to have a larger implication. The implication is that Person C is the type of person who is likely to fail a class, even if she has not yet done it.

Bibliography

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Korta, Kepa, and John Perry. "Pragmatics." Stanford Encyclopedia, 28 May 2024, plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.

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