Page 32 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

9 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

cepts, for formalizing assumptions initially formulated in ordinary
language, for clarifying deductive relations among particular
hypotheses, for interpreting results of measurement, and so on.
Nonetheless, reconstructive procedures are not characteristic of
sciences that develop nomological hypotheses about domains of ob-
servable events; rather, these procedures are characteristic of sc7-
ences that systematically reconstruct the intuitive knowledge of
competent subjects.
I would like to begin (clarifying the distinction between em-
pirical-analytic and reconstructive sciences) with the distinction
between sensory experience or observation and communicative
experience or understanding [Verstehen}. Observation is directed
to perceptible things and events (or states); understanding is
directed to the meaning of utterances.?° In experiencing, the ob-
server is in principle alone, even if the categorial net in which
experiences are organized with a claim to objectivity is already
shared by several (or even all) individuals. In contrast, the inter-
preter who understands meaning is experiencing fundamentally
aS a participant in communication, on the basis of a symboli-
cally established intersubjective relationship with other individ-
uals, even if he is actually alone with a book, a document, or
a work of art. I shall not here analyze the complex relationship
between observation and understanding any further; but I would
Itke to direct attention to one aspect—the difference in level be-
tween perceptible reality and the understandable meaning of a
symbolic formation. Sensory experience is related to sectors of
reality immediately, communicative experience only mediately, as
illustrated in the diagram below.

Level 1 Observable, Events <— Observation, (Observer)
I
Level 2 L-~~--- Observation Sentence «—Understanding
; (Interpreter)
|
Level 3 Lb—~-~——- Interpretation

This diagram represents three different relationships.