Chris Potts writes in with a question:
What is the job title of a person who studies pragmatics? We have syntacticians, semanticists, phonologists … and “people who study pragmatics”? It’s just too clumsy.
I’ve asked around a bit. Greg Carlson told me that they use ‘pragmaticist’ at Rochester. But, to me, this sounds too much like ‘pragmatist’. It’s somewhat like ‘Pragmatiker’ in German — it should be blocked because of (near) homophony with a basically unrelated nonspecialist’s term.
I used ‘pragmatician’ in a manuscript once, but it sounds too clinical. ‘Pragmateur’ is charming in its haughtiness; it has Mike Dickey’s vote. But my current favorite is ‘pragmaticalist’. I like the ‘radical’ overtone. What do your readers think, though?
–Chris
“Pragmaticist” seems like the obvious choice to me.
What do you all think?
“Pragmaticist”. I like “pragmaticist”.
October 5th, 2005, at 8:46 pm #I also favor “pragmaticist”. It sounds normal; “pragmaticalist” sounds to me like it must violate some word-formation rule, like maybe we never add “ist” to adjectives? No, that can’t be: “nudist”. Never to adjectives that end in “al”? No, not that either: “minimalist”. I give up. Anyway, it’s sort of cute but I don’t think I could ever say it. (Sorry, Chris!)
October 6th, 2005, at 12:29 am #“pragmaticist”. After years of worrying that it wasn’t the right term, but saying it anyway, I got used enough to it that it’s now a normal part of my vocabulary.
October 6th, 2005, at 8:42 am #“pragmaticalist” immediately reminded me of Ali G.’s “racialist”, and thus of Ali-G-speak in general—which may be a pro if you’re going for funny connotations.
October 6th, 2005, at 10:04 am #Pragmatist is the follower of the Philosophical thought called pragmatism, and not necessarily the expert in Pragmatics. I have heard most linguists, whose first language is English, say pragmatician more often than pragmaticist.
October 6th, 2005, at 10:36 am #“Pragmaticist” is the word that leaps to mind for me, though irritatingly Merriam-Webster defines it as “an advocate of pragmaticism”, another word for the philosophical school founded by C.S. Peirce that Tony mentions above. All the same, it’s in direct analogy to “semantics/semanticist”; the main competitor is, I think “pragmatician” in analogy to “syntactician, logician”.
“Pragmaticalist” strikes me as quite strange, as well (we don’t say “syntacticalist” or “logicalist”). I think there may in fact be a word formation rule being violated: “-ist” can attach to “-al” adjectives, but given an “-ic”/”-ical” variation, we attach “-ist” to the former. (Variation as in geographic(al), comic(al), monastic(al), where the sense doesn’t change. I suppose that in those cases where it does, e.g. “politic” = judicious, “political” = concerning law, one could arguably add “-ist” to either: a politicist is one who follows a doctrine of being politic, and a politicalist is one who follows a doctrine of being political. But “pragmatic(al)” isn’t one of those cases.)
October 7th, 2005, at 4:40 pm #What of “Pragmatista” ?
October 12th, 2005, at 6:06 pm #C. S. Peirce adopted the term “Pragmaticist” to distinguish between his understanding of pragmatism, and “Pragmatism” as popularized by William James (who credited Peirce for originally coining the term). Here’s a link to a C. S. Peirce linkfarm:
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.htm
One of Peirce’s pet peeves was the recycling of terminology, especially common terms that didn’t carry the same implication or strict meaning across multiple translations between languages and eras. His philosophic and scientific definitions written for the Century Dictionary are very interesting partly for this reason (also, he’s somewhat smarmy). One consequence is that he often made up words in order to clarify and distinguish the particular definitions within his own systems, which is clever as it discourages jumping between different parts of his more complicated work, as well as the philosophic habit of using fuzzy analogies.
As a result, “Pragmaticist” carries a different association than “Pragmatism” or “Pragmatist”, as the latter have been blurred and watered down, while the former is ugly and unwieldy enough to discourage abuse (which was Peirce’s stated reason for opting to use it).
October 27th, 2005, at 2:07 am #I like the word pragmatician most since we already have syntactician, logician, etc.
October 30th, 2005, at 10:35 pm #Pragmaticist was my obvious choice. However, syntactician has been cited. AND, I’ll add:
phonetician
December 28th, 2007, at 2:02 am #