The Pragmatic Understanding of Language and the Argumentative Function of Logic

Abstract

Pragmatic understanding of language means that language structures, especially logical structures, are reconstructed throughout not as objects but as part of a rational practice. 1 Such a pragmatic reconstruction cannot draw on those conceptions of language and logic that at present are dominant in formal logic and linguistics. These are mostly based on the so called “semantic point of view” which, in its modern form, goes back to Tarski. Here one has to take the word ‘semantic’ not just in the general Greek sense indicating only that the meaning of language expressions is treated. Rather, the word ‘semantic’ refers to a quite peculiar theory of meaning. This theory assumes that language consists of special (structured) objects, which become meaningful by their being related to certain other objects so to speak “in the world”. Among these other objects we have to imagine such abstract objects as functions, especially truth functions. These meaning relations are introduced and analysed by using another language (or level of language) which is usually called “(the) metalanguage”. In the metalanguage, so we are informed, we can speak about the object language, i.e. that language which is the ‘object’ of our considerations.