Pragmatics and Responsibility

Pragmatics is the socially situated performance of linguistic actions, and is seen as unruly, compared to semantics, syntax, and phonology. Givón (1989) defines pragmatics as the rejection of Plato's doctrine of the "excluded middle," the view that reality is either deterministic or chaotic. This suggests a natural affinity between pragmatics and complex dynamical systems. Healthy language, like a healthy heart, follows complex rhythms that are neither repetitive nor chaotic (van Orden, 2007). Fundamental marks of complex dynamical systems are context-sensitivity and interdependency rather than rule-following and modularity. As pragmatics attests, to know how to speak appropriately with another is not to follow rules: A slight change in context shifts what had seemed a fixed regime into another region of possibilities. Pragmatic contexts play a constitutive role in the creation and sustenance of linguistic affordances.

Pragmatics can be described as the study of how our speaking and listening are shaped to be caring and careful. Grice’s (1975) influential account of pragmatic constraints takes cooperation to be a fundamental motive of conversing. Humans are “an extraordinarily cooperative species” (Sterelny, 2003), and it is likely that this has contributed to our having developed linguistic abilities in unprecedented ways (Tomasello, 2008, 2009). If one examines the guts of Grice’s claims one finds a values-realizing core: Language works, according to Grice, only if we attend to the demands of truth, kindness, justice, economy, clarity, and coherence, as we speak. From an ecological perspective, the dialogical complement must be added: The listener must attend to the demands of charity, creativity, and trust, as they listen, if the conversation is to work. However, even adding the listener is not enough. In conversations we jointly work out what justice, truth, and freedom demand of us (as a group, and as individuals) as we work together on some task(s).

All this points to a fundamental function of language: It is a crucial means by which humans care for each other, including themselves, and their surroundings (Hodges, 2007a). Unless humans care about themselves, others, and the world, there is little or no reason to speak or to listen. Saying something meaningful (i.e., values-realizing) is no trivial feat; proper phonology, syntax, and semantics do not necessarily yield sense. To speak meaningfully is to engage in an act of irreversible, impredicative responsibility to addressees (Hodges & Fowler, 2010). To say that an act is impredicative is to say that it is self-referential (Petrusz & Turvey, 2010): It points to the self, locating it as responsible to the other, and to assessing properly their current location and relation, and to prospecting together their future possible directions. The irreversibility of action is that it moves in some real direction with real force; it cannot be taken back. Speaking is such an action in its ecological setting; we say what we say as who we are, to whom we say it, at the place and time of the saying, and all of this gives ontological and moral heft to our utterances. It was this heft that Bakhtin (1993) was pointing to in claiming that utterances were always addressed and answerable. Our utterances bear (embody) the placing and the intentionality of their circumstances.

We speak out of the conviction that together we can measure our present place better, and can work out more fruitfully how we might move into the future, creating new places and possibilities into which to act, if we engage each other in conversation. Since listening is not only the reciprocal of speaking, but actually co-constructs the utterances of the speaker, as the conversation unfolds over time, it partakes of the same responsibility as speaking. This suggests that the directness of language, its meaning and value, “lies not in some deductive certainty, but in the subtle social and moral dynamics of real physical bodies, dialogically arrayed, that have directly shared and cared for a set of places and tasks over a common history, working to do the next thing that needs to be done for the good of those places, those tasks, and themselves” (Hodges & Fowler, 2010). “Conversing seeks good prospects.” (Hodges, 2007b, p. 174).

Recommended reading:

Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hodges, B. H., & Fowler, C. A. (2010). New affordances for language: Distributed, dynamical, and dialogical resources. Ecological Psychology, 22, 239-254.