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19 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

poses a competing paradigm; it has to be shown in terms of the
success or failure of the theories and explanations the competing
paradigms make possible.
The second objection is directed toward the unreliability of
intuitively founded speakers’ intuitions, for which there exists
impressive empirical evidence.*® Here again, it seems to me that
an empificist interpretation of speakers’ judgments stimulates
false expectations and suggests the wrong remedy. The expression
intuitive knowledge should not be understood as meaning that a
speaker’s pretheoretical knowledge about the grammaticality of a
sentence (the rigor of a derivation, the cogency of a theory, and
so forth) is the kind of directly ascertainable intuition that is
incapable of being discursively justified. On the contrary, the
implicit knowledge has to be brought to consciousness through
the choice of suitable examples and counterexamples, through
contrast and similarity relations, through translation, paraphrase,
and so on—that is, through a well-thought-out maeutic method
of interrogation. Ascertaining the so-called intuitions of a speaker
is already the beginning of their explication. For this reason, the
procedure practiced by Chomsky and many others seems to me to
be meaningful and adequate. One starts with clear cases, in which
the reactions of the subjects converge, in order to develop struc-
tural descriptions on this basis and then, in the light of the hy-
potheses gained, to present less clear cases in such a way that the
process of interrogation can lead to an adequate clarification of
these cases as well. I do not see anything wrong in this cir-
cular procedure; every research process moves in such a circle
between theory formation and precise specification of the object
domain.*1
The second methodological question is more difficult. It is one
that has been treated as an empirical question in the psycholin-
guistics of the past decade, and as such has inspired a great
amount of research: is there a direct correspondence between the
linguistic theory of grammar and the mental grammar that is, so
to speak, “in the mind” of the speaker? *? According to the cor-
relation hypothesis, linguistic reconstructions are not simply lucid
and economical representations of linguistic data; instead, there
is a psychological complexity of the actual production process that