Pragmatics and Semantics
A lot of contemporary philosophical theories focus on semantics. For instance, Brandom focuses on linguistic meaning (albeit from a pragmatic viewpoint).
Others take an approach that is more holistic to pragmatics, like relevance theory, that aims to explore how an utterance is perceived by the listener. But this approach tends to ignore other aspects of pragmatism, like epistemic debates on truth.
What is pragmatism?
Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that offers a viable alternative to analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. It was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, and extended by his friend and colleague William James, and later developed by Josiah Royce. It had a profound influence on the fields of inquiry from theology of philosophy to philosophy of science but also ethics as well as philosophy of politics and language. The pragmatist tradition continues grow.
The pragmatic maxim is at the center of classical pragmatics. It is a rule that clarifies the meaning of hypotheses by examining their 'practical implications' or their implications for the experience of specific situations. This leads to an epistemological perspective that is a type of 'inquiry-based epistemology' as well as an anti-Cartesian explication of the rules that govern inquiry. The early pragmatists generally disagreed on the issue of whether pragmatism ought to think of itself as a philosophy of science that focuses on a monism of truth (following Peirce), or a broad-based alethic pluralism (James and Dewey).
Understanding knowledge is a central question for pragmatics. Rorty is one pragmatist who is skeptical of notions of knowledge founded on 'immediate experience'. Others, like Peirce and James are skeptical of the theory of correspondence as a source of truth, according to which true beliefs are those that represent reality 'correctly'.
Other pragmatism-related issues include the relationship between belief and reality as well as the nature of human rationality, the role of values and virtues, and the meaning of life. Pragmatists have also developed a broad variety of ideas and methods in fields like semiotics philosophy of language, the philosophy of religion and ethics, philosophy of science and theology. Some, like Peirce and Royce are epistemological relativists, whereas others believe that such relativism is completely wrong. The 20th century was marked by a revival of interest in classical pragmatics. This resulted in a variety of new developments. This includes the concept of a "near-side" pragmatics that is concerned with the resolution of ambiguity, indexicals, demonstratives, and anaphors. There is also the "far-side" pragmatics that analyzes the semantics in discourses.
What is the connection between what you say and what you do?
Semantics and Pragmatics are often viewed as being on opposite ends of the continuum, with semantics on the near side and pragmatics on the far side. Carston, for example, argues that there are at most three general lines of contemporary pragmatics people who view it as a philosophical concept along the lines of Grice and others