Page 28 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

5 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

he acknowledges that a sentence is grammatical, a statement true,
an intentional expression truthful, or an utterance correct. The
validity of these symbolic structures is grounded in the fact that
they satisfy certain adequacy conditions; but the meaning of the
validity consists in worthiness to be recognized, that is, in the
guarantee that intersubjective recognition can be brought about
under suitable conditions.*
I have proposed the name universal pragmatics for the research
program aimed at reconstructing the universal validity basis of
speech.® I would like now to delimit the theme of this research
program in a preliminary way. Thus before passing on (in part
II) to the theory of speech acts, I shall prefix a few directorial
remarks dealing with (1) a first delimitation of the object domain
of the universal pragmatics called for; (2) an elucidation of the
procedure of rational reconstruction, in contrast to empirical-
analytic procedure in the narrower sense; (3) a few methodolog-
ical difficulties resulting from the fact that linguistics claims the
status of a reconstructive science; and finally (4) the question of
whether the universal pragmatics proposed assumes the position
of a transcendental reflective theory or that of a reconstructive
science with empirical content. I shall restrict myself to directorial
remarks because, while these questions are fundamental and de-
serve to be examined independently, they form only the context
of the theme I shall treat and thus must remain in the background.

Preliminary Delimitation of the Object Domain

In several of his works, Apel has pointed to the abstractive fallacy
that underlies the prevailing approach to the logic of science.®
The logical analysis of language that originated with Carnap
focuses primarily on syntactic and semantic properties of linguistic
formations. Like structuralist linguistics, it delimits its object
domain by first abstracting from the pragmatic properties of
language, subsequently introducing the pragmatic dimension in
such a way that the constitutive connection between the genera-
tive accomplishments of speaking and acting subjects, on the one
hand, and the gereral structures of speech, on the other, cannot
come into view. It is certainly legitimate to draw an abstractive