Page 86 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

63 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

his speech act, influences the hearer, can be understood only if
we take into consideration sequences of speech actions that are
connected with one another on the basis of a reciprocal recogni-
tion of validity claims.
With their illocutionary acts, speaker and hearer raise validity
claims and demand they be recognized. But this recognition need
not follow irrationally, since the validity claims have a cognitive
character and can be checked. I would like, therefore, to defend
the following thesis: In the final analysts, the speaker can illocu-
tionarily influence the hearer and vice versa, because speech-act-
typical commitments are connected with cognitively testable
validity clatms—that is, because the reciprocal bonds have a
rational basis. The engaged speaker normally connects the specific
sense in which he would like to take up an interpersonal rela-
tionship with a thematically stressed validity claim and thereby
chooses a specific mode of communication.
Thus assertions, descriptions, classifications, estimates, predic-
tions, objections, and the like, have different specific meanings;
but the claim put forward in these different interpersonal rela-
tionships ts, or is based on, the truth of corresponding propo-
sitions or on the ability of a subject to have cognitions. Corre-
spondingly, requests, orders, admonitions, promises, agreements,
excuses, admissions, and the like, have different specific mean-
ings; but the claim put forward in these different interpersonal
relauonships is, or refers to, the rightness of norms or to the
ability of a subject to assume responsibility. We might say that
in different speech acts the content of the speaker’s engagement
is determined by different ways of appealing to the same, themat-
ically stressed, universal validity claim. And since as a result of
this appeal to universal validity claims, the speech-act-typical
commitments take on the character of obligations to provide
grounds or to prove trustworthy, the hearer can be rationally
motivated by the speaker’s signaled engagement to accept the
latter’s offer. I would like to elucidate this for each of the three
modes of communication.
In the cognitive use of language, the speaker proffers a speech-
act-immanent obligation to provide grounds { Bergrindungsver-
pfuchtung}. Constative speech acts contain the offer to recur if