Page 48 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

25 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

hand, the reconstruction of this knowledge calls for inquiries un-
dertaken with empirical speakers—the linguist procures for him-
self a knowledge a posteriori. The implicit knowledge of com-
petent speakers is so different from the explicit form of linguistic
description that the individual linguist cannot rely on reflection on
his own speech intuitions. The procedures employed in con-
structing and testing hypotheses, in appraising competing re-
constructive proposals, in gathering and selecting data, are in
many ways like the procedures used in the nomological sciences.
Methodological differences that can be traced back to differences
in the structure of data (observable events versus understandable
signs) and to differences between the structures of laws and rules,
do not suffice to banish linguistics, for example, from the sphere
of empirical science.
This is particularly true of ontogenetic theories that, like
Piaget’s cognitive developmental psychology, connect the struc-
tural description of competences (and of reconstructed patterns
of development of these competences) with assumptions con-
cerning causal mechanisms.®® The paradigms introduced by
Chomsky and Piaget have led to a type of research determined
by a peculiar connection between formal and empirical analysis
rather than by their classical separation. The expression tran-
scendental, with which we associate a contrast to empirical sci-
ence, is thus unsuited to characterizing, without misunderstanding,
a line of research such as universal pragmatics. Behind the termi-
nological question, there stands the systematic question concern-
ing the as-yet insufficiently clarified status of nonnomological
empirical sciences of the reconstructive type. I shall have to leave
this question aside here. In any case, the attempt to play down
the interesting methodological differences that arise here, and
to interpret them away in the sense of the unified science program,
seems to have little prospect of success.*”

I]

The discussion of the theory of speech acts has given rise to ideas
on which the fundamental assumptions of universal pragmatics
can be based.5* The universal-pragmatic point of view from which