Pragmatics and foundationalism

Abstract

My discussion of Bickhard and Campbell’s ‘Some foundational questions concerning language studies’ will be, as their paper is, programmatic and succinct. I will focus on what I take to be the reason why the editors of the Journal of Pragmatics decided to devote a special issue to this paper, namely the authors’ argument to the effect that a ‘functional, pragmatic, or interactive’ conception of representation, meaning, and linguistic structures must be adopted as a unified foundation for epistemology, cognitive science, and language studies. In order to focus on the essentials of this argument, other valuable aspects of the authors’ work will not be commented upon here. Let me say, from the outset, that I share much of B&C’s concern about the inadequacy of traditional forms of representationalism (cf. Dascal 1989) as well as their emphasis on the thorough ‘pragmaticity’ and ‘context-dependence’ of language and cognition (cf. Dascal 1983, 1992). Where I diverge from them is in the conclusion they draw from this, namely, the attribution of a ‘foundational’ role to pragmatics. B&C’s argument proceeds as follows. First, they argue that if all representations were ‘encodings’ (i.e., substitutional, translational, or ‘stand-in’ relations), then it would be impossible to explain how they acquire or possess content. The reason is that the basic formula for assigning content to an encoding is “‘Y represents the same thing as ‘I”, for epistemic agent A”, which can only succeed in assigning content if agent A already knows what ‘Y’ represents. Hence, there must be some other, more fundamental form of representation, where content arises without presupposing that it is already explicitly represented or known. For B&C, such a form is ‘intrinsically functional in nature’. The content of such representations is an emergent property they acquire by virtue of their role in providing a goal-directed, hierarchically organized system with a set of informational selections that increases the likelihood of the system to reach its goal. Such a system interacts with the environment. The results of any such interaction include ‘internal outcomes’, which depend on the system as well as on the environment. An internal