Chapter 9: The dynamics of Control in the Case of Mrs. C: A Pragmatic Study of the Patient/Analyst Dialogue

Pragmatics, now a widely used empirical method, has its origins in a theory originally developed by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 19th century. Peirce aimed to provide a realist account of how as sentient beings we relate to the world of objects, and others, through the continuous, developmental process of “perceptual judgments,” mediated through interactions with others in the sign-rich world of human communication. If pragmatics is to be “explained by means of the word, it must be public experience that we speak of consisting of public operations, and public in the sense that a scientific experiment is” (Buchler, 1939/2010, p. 117). Peirce provided the philosophical foundation for the development of American pragmatics, subsequently applied to psychology (James, 1890), education (Dewey, 1916), and social psychology (Mead, 1934).