Page 29 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

6 Communication and Evolution of Society

distinction between language as structure and speaking as process.
A language will then be understood as a system of rules for
generating expressions, such that all well-formed expressions
(e.g., sentences) may count as elements of this language. On the
other hand, subjects capable of speaking can employ such ex-
pressions as participants in a process of communication; they can
utter sentences as well as understand and respond to sentences
expressed. This abstraction of language from the use of language
in speech (langue versus parole), which is made in both the
logical and the structuralist analysis of language, is meaningful.
Nonetheless, this methodological step is not sufficient reason for
the view that the pragmatic dimension of language from which one
abstracts is beyond formal analysis. The fact of the successful, or
at least promising, reconstruction of linguistic rule systems can-
not serve as a justification for restricting formal analysis to this
object domain. The separation of the two analytic levels, language
and speech, should not be made in such a way that the pragmatic
dimension of language is left to exclusively empirical analysis—
that is, to empirical sciences such as psycholinguistics and sociolin-
guistics. I would defend the thesis that not only language but
speech too—that is, the employment of sentences in utterances—is
accessible to formal analysis. Like the elementary units of language
(sentences), the elementary units of speech (utterances) can be
analyzed in the methodological attitude of a reconstructive science.
Approaches to a general theory of communication have been
developed from the semzotzcs of Charles Morris.’ They integrate
into their framework of fundamental concepts the model of lin-
guistic behaviorism (the symbolically mediated behavioral reac-
tion of the stimulated individual organism) and the model of
information transmission (encoding and decoding signals be-
tween sender and receiver for a given channel and an at-least-
partially-common store of signs). If the speaking process is thus
conceptualized, the fundamental question of universal pragmatics
concerning the general conditions of possible understanding can-
not be suitably posed. For example, the intersubjectivity of mean-
ings that are identical for at least two speakers does not even
become a problem (1) if the identity of meanings is reduced to
extensionally equivalent classes of behavioral properties, as is