Page 51 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

28 Communication and Evolution of Society

in relation to (1) the external reality of what is supposed to be
an existing state of affairs, (2) the internal reality of what a
speaker would like to express before a public as his intentions,
and, finally, (3) the normative reality of what is intersubjec-
tively recognized as a legitimate interpersonal relationship. It is
thereby placed under validity claims that it need not and cannot
fulfill as a nonsituated sentence, as a purely grammatical forma-
tion. A chain of symbols ‘counts’ as a sentence of a natural
language, L, 1f it is well-formed according to the system of gram-
matical rules, GL. The grammaticality of a sentence means (from
a pragmatic perspective) that the sentence, when uttered by a
speaker, is comprehensible to all hearers who have mastered GL.
Comprehensibility is the only one of these universal claims that
can be fulfilled immanently to language. The validity of a propo-
sitional content depends, by contrast, on whether the proposition
stated represents a fact (or whether the existential presupposi-
tions of a mentioned propositional content hold); the validity of
an intention expressed depends on whether it corresponds to what
is actually intended by the speaker; and the validity of the ut-
terance performed depends on whether this action conforms to a
recognized normative background. Whereas a grammatical sen-
tence fulfills the claim to comprehensibility, a successful utterance
must satisfy three additional validity claims: it must count as true
for the participants insofar as it represents something in the
world; it must count as truthful insofar as it expresses something
intended by the speaker; and it must count as right insofar as it
conforms to socially recognized expectations.
Naturally we can identify characteristics of the surface struc-
tures of sentences that have a special significance for the three
general pragmatic functions of the utterance: to represent some-
thing, to express an intention, to establish a legitimate interper-
sonal relation. Propositional sentences can be used to represent
an existing state of affairs (or to mention them indirectly in
non-constative speech acts); intentional verbs, modal forms, and
so on can be used to express the speaker’s intentions; performa-
tive phrases, illocutionary indicators, and the like can be used to
establish interpersonal relations between speaker and hearer. Thus
the general structures of speech are also reflected at the level of