Logic vs. pragmatics, with human language as the referee: Toward an empirically viable epistemology
1982; Elsevier BV; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0378-2166(82)90026-1
ISSN1879-1387
Autores Tópico(s)Advanced Algebra and Logic
ResumoThe history of the treatment of both semantics and pragmatics in Linguistics has been until recently a captive of over-logicization, where the deductive, algorithmic, close-ended, context-free properties of the system were over-emphasized to the detriment of a more realistic view of facts of natural language. A careful survey of even the traditional preoccupations of logicians and philosophers of language, such as reference, definite description or presupposition, reveals that the logico-deductive treatment of these subjects misrepresented their overall nature by systematically masking their overwhelmingly pragmatic nature - context sensitivity, open-endedness and probabilistic/ inductive/abductive inference. This paper surveys the linguistic evidence of both traditional and less traditional kind, showing human language to be a mixed system, whereby deductive ('automated') processing always arises out of the slower, probabilistic, abductive/pragmatic ('analytic') processing, under well-defined communicative conditions. These two major systems in cognizing organisms are then contrasted as to their properties and functional distribution, and it is shown that a similar interplay between the two is attested in neurology, perception, motor behavior and memory and retrieval studies. The rise of deductive out of pragmatic processing is thus a more specific reflection of a general biological phenomenon of the rise of routinization and automated circuits out of the slower, analytic, context-sensitive input-processing mode.
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