Page 37 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

14 Communication and Evolution of Society

plishment of rule consciousness. Reconstructive proposals are di-
rected to domains of pretheoretical knowledge, that is, not to any
implicit opinion, but to a proven intuitive foreknowledge. The
rule consciousness of competent speakers functions as a court of
evaluation, for instance, with regard to the grammaticality of sen-
tences. Whereas the understanding of content is directed to any
utterance whatever, reconstructive understanding refers only to
symbolic objects characterized as well formed by competent sub-
jects themselves. Thus, for example, syntactic theory, proposi-
tional logic, the theory of science, and ethics start with syntacti-
cally well-formed sentences, correctly fashioned propositions,
well-corroborated theories, and morally unobjectionable resolu-
tions of norm conflicts, in order to reconstruct the rules according
to which these formations can be produced. To the extent that
universal-validity claims (the grammaticality of sentences, the
consistency of propositions, the truth of hypotheses, the rightness
of norms of action) underlie intuitive evaluations, as in our ex-
amples, reconstructions relate to pretheoretical knowledge of a
general sort, to aniversal capabilities, and not only to particular
competences of individual groups (e.g., the ability to utter sen-
tences in a Low-German dialect or to solve problems in quantum
physics) or to the ability of particular individuals (e.g., to write
an exemplary Entwicklungsroman in the middle of the twentieth
century). When the pretheoretical knowledge to be reconstructed
expresses a universal capability, a general cognitive, linguistic, or
interactive competence (or subcompetence), then what begins as
an explication of meaning aims at the reconstruction of species
competences. In scope and status, these reconstructions can be
compared with general theories.**
It is the great merit of Chomsky to have developed this idea in
the case of grammatical theory (for the first time in Syntactic
Structures, 1957). Roughly speaking, it is the task of grammat-
ical theory to reconstruct the rule consciousness common to all
competent speakers in such a way that the proposals for recon-
struction represent the system of rules that permits potential
speakers to acquire the competence, in at least one language (L),
to produce and to understand sentences that count as grammat-
ical in L, as well as to distinguish sentences well-formed in L
from ungrammatical sentences.*?