Page 443 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

not so much interested in what people actually said as in the rules of the grammar, insofar as they appear in what people say; another famous linguist was wont to describe a 'good linguist' as one who did not know any languages (thereby defining the term in contrast to one of its common meanings in nontechnical or somewhat older English, where a 'linguist' precisely is a person with a good command of (preferably)many languages).
Faced with these testimonials, one can only wonder and ask (adopting a distinction that was originally established by Chomsky (1957, 1965) for a slightly different purpose, namely to exclude actual linguistic usage from the business of describing the language from a theoretical point of view) what caused this split between the competence of linguists, on the one hand, and the performance of language users, on the other?
1.6 The Logical Way
A final argument for the introduction of the pragmatic point of view also in the way people think, or could be brought to think, about their language and the way to use it, has to do with logic.
One of the most tenacious ideas promulgated in discussions of language is the notion that language is a matter of logic. This is taken to mean that a correct use of language presupposes the use of logic, and that any use of language which is not in accordance with the laws of logic is simply bad. Logic thus is prior to language; it is maintained that everyday language is a bastardized and illegitimate variant of the pure lan- guage of logic, as manifested in mathematics, formal logic, and maybe even abstract music. To express one- self in illogical terms is the same as to speak badly; logic may be the handmaiden of philosophy, but lan- guage is certainly the handmaiden of logic. To top it all off, even the Bible admonishes people (as some philosophers believe) to express themselves in simple, logical terms of affirmation and negation: 'Let your communication be Yea, Yea; Nay, Nay: for what- soever is more than these cometh of evil' (Matthew 5:37).
In pragmatics, many of the early discussions on the foundation of this science have turned around the possibility and desirability of letting pragmatic con- ditions govern the correct use of logical propositions, when disguised as 'ordinary language' utterances. As the facts would have it, however, logic and language are strange fellow-travelers: the amount of ground that they cover between them is not very encouraging, at any rate for the logician. Consider a simple case.
According to a well-known rule from logic, when conjoining two propositions (call them p and q, and symbolize their conjunction by the formula p&q), it is not important in which order the two constituents of the formula appear:p&qis equivalent to q&p.
Next consider the following (Levinson 1983:35). Somebody utters the sentence Getting married and
having a child is better than having a child and getting married. Supposing the everyday language con- junction and can be identified with the logical con- junction '&,' this gives a logical proposition of the form p ('getting married') & q ('having a child'), ex- pressed in everyday language by means of a sentence like the above. Such an utterance should then, by the laws of logic, be equivalent to the proposition q ('having a child') &p ('getting married'). Hence, the above utterance would be equivalent to Having a child and getting married is better than getting married and having a child.
But clearly, in everyday life as in everyday language use, the two sentences do not mean the same; far from it. Which of the two is 'true' depends, of course, on the actual circumstances in which the utterers of the sentence live, in particular with regard to the con- ditions of their (married) lives and to matters of child- bearing and -rearing. These circumstances are not to be predicted from the language as such, but can only be discovered by looking at the total human context of use, as seen above. Either sentence can be the expression of complete stupidity or of age-old wis- dom; it all depends on the context of culture and life. But one thing is certain: they are in no way equivalent in everyday life, whatever they may be in the world of logic. A logical conjunction, by itself, says nothing about the temporal sequence of the conjuncts: actu- ally, such considerations of time are completely alien to (classical) logic.
A further, and perhaps even more profound, diffi- culty lies in the fact that there is no a priori guarantee that any logical symbols (such as and, or its logical 'sister' or) can be faithfully represented by the words of a natural language (such as and, or in English). Vice versa, the words of the language do not univocally belong to one particular logical entity: for instance, the conjunction but is very different from and in daily use, yet it normally does not have a separate logical symbol. Thus, a conjunction of two sentences in the language by the conjunction and cannot be said simply to represent a logical conjunction of the type and. Logic is in essence an abstraction from language, and should never be made into its dominant perspective.
2. OnDefiningPragmatics
2.1 A New Paradigm
If pragmatics did not just 'happen'; if it did not come in from nowhere, one is led to ask how it could become such a popular trend in such a relatively short time.
The answer to this question will at the same time provide a first approximation to an understanding of what pragmatics is all about. A more elaborate, but still tentative, definition is given in Sect. 2.3.5; such a definition will necessarily have an 'intensional' touch to it (it will say something about what pragmatics is supposed to be). It will not be easy to supplement this with an 'extensionaF definition, since it is notoriously
Pragmatics
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