Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) is considered the father of pragmatism. Historically
there is a link between Darwin's theory of evolution (1859, applied to humans 1870)
and discussions in the ‘Metaphysical Club’ at Harvard which began meeting
in 1872 and had William James and Charles Sanders Peirce as members. Their point
of view was that pragmatics is Darwin’s theory of natural selection applied
to philosophy. In a speech delivered in Harvard in 1872 Ch. S. Peirce sketched his
‘Pragmatism’ as a philosophy based on the practical consequences of
intellectual operations. The term ‘pragmatic’ refers to Kant's “Anthropologie
in pragmatischer Hinsicht” (1798: „pragmatisch nach Regeln der Klugheit“).
Pragmatic aspects of evolutionary semiotics have been
considered in Wildgen (2010c).
After Austin and Searle speech acts, i.e. actions done via speech were the major
center of interest. The dynamics underlying the classical speech act: I promise
you …is analyzed in terms of different forces governing its fulfillment
by Brandt (1991: Pour une sémiotique de la promesse). Other important
aspects are deixis (related to the semiotics of indexicality) and questions of relevance
and “prégnance”. For the first see Plümacher (2009). Thom’s theory
of “saillance” and “prégnance” is discussed by several authors
in the volume edited by Wildgen and Brandt (2010). The cooperative principle is
another key term of pragmatics; if we ask where cooperation (and its contrary rivalry,
conflict) come from, we enter the field of evolutionary semiotics.
Language is a technique to share information and thus presupposes cooperation. “Why
does Homo sapiens easily share information with others but chimpanzees don’t?”
is a question of evolutionary pragmatics.
The relation of current pragmatic philosophy (e.g. Brandom) and its linguistic/semiotic
consequences are commented in Harendarski (2010).