History
Universal pragmatics (UP) seeks to overcome three dichotomies: the dichotomy between body and mind, between theory and practice, and between analytic and continental philosophy. It is part of a larger project to rethink the relationship between philosophy and the individual sciences during a period of social crisis. The project is within the tradition of Critical Theory, a program that traces back to the work of Max Horkheimer.
The term "universal pragmatics" includes two different traditions that Habermas and his collaborator, colleague, and friend Karl-Otto Apel have attempted to reconcile. On the one hand, ideas are drawn from the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, wherein words and concepts are regarded as universally valid idealizations of shared meanings. And, on the other hand, inspiration is drawn from the American Pragmatist tradition (feat. Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, Charles W. Morris), for whom words are arbitrary signs devoid of intrinsic meaning, and whose function is to denote the things and processes in the objective world that surrounds the speakers.
UP shares with speech act theory, semiotics, and linguistics an interest in the details of language use and communicative action. However, unlike those fields, it insists on a difference between the linguistic data that we observe in the 'analytic' mode, and the rational reconstruction of the rules of symbol systems that each reader/listener possesses intuitively when interpreting strings of words. In this sense, it is an examination of the two ways that language usage can be analyzed: as an object of scientific investigation, and as a 'rational reconstruction' of intuitive linguistic 'know-how'.
Read more about this topic: Universal Pragmatics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)