Page 34 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

II What Is Universal Pragmatics?

needs explanation, we demand a causal description that makes
clear how the phenomenon in question comes to pass. If, by
contrast, the description itself is incomprehensible, we demand
an explication that makes clear what the observer meant by his
utterance'and how the symbolic expression in need of elucidation
comes about. In the first case, a satisfactory answer will have the
form of an explanation we undertake with the aid of a causal
hypothesis. In the second case, we speak of explication of mean-
ing. (Of course, explications of meaning need not be limited to
descriptive sentences; any meaningfully structured formation can
)
be subjected to the operation of meaning explication.
Descriptions and explications have different ranges; they can
begin on the surface and push through to underlying structures.
We are familiar with this fact in regard to the explanation of
natural phenomena—theories can be more or less general. The
same is true of meaning explications. Of course, the range of
explication does not depend on the level of generality of theoret-
ical knowledge about structures of an external reality accessible
to observation but on knowledge of the deep structures of a reality
accessible to understanding, the reality of symbolic formations
produced according to rules. The explanation of natural phe-
nomena pushes in a different direction from the explication of the
meaning of expressions.
I want to distinguish two levels of explication of meaning. If
the meaning of a written sentence, action, gesture, work of art,
tool, theory, commodity, transmitted document, and so on, is
unclear, the explication of meaning is directed first to the semantic
content of the symbolic formation. In trying to understand its
content, we take up the same position as the ‘author’ adopted
when he wrote the sentence, performed the gesture, used the
tool, applied the theory, and so forth. Often too we must go
beyond what was meant and intended by the author and take into
consideration a context of which he was not conscious." Typically,
however, the znderstanding of content pursues connections that
link the surface structures of the incomprehensible formation
with the surface structures of other, familiar formations. Thus,
linguistic expressions can be explicated through paraphrase in the
same language or through translation into expressions of another