The Pragmatician’s Self-fashioning

Liu Yameng

Fujian Normal University

“语用学家”的自我定位福建师范大学　刘亚猛

Foreword Now is the historical moment for pragmaticians to reflect on who or what we are, and to draw from all available theoretical resources, in forging our own professional character, shaping their own collective identity, and turning ourselves into the kind of scholars we’d feel proud of becoming, for now.

1. What is a pragmatician? And should anyone bother with the definition?

1.1. The cons:

It is an easy, trivial, uninspiring question, and hence unworthy of our attention.

--- self-evident;

--- derivative;

--- unpromising.

1.2. The pros:

The question is challenging, difficult, significant

--- Nothing is more challenging than to “know thyself”;

--- Its answer is elusive, intractable, hard to pin down;

--- The illusion of a unified, cohesive fiel

d

“Among pragmaticians, there seems to be

no agreement as to how to do pragmatics, n

or as to what pragmatics is, nor how to defi

ne it, nor even as to what pragmatics is no

t” (Mey 1998, 716)

--- it forces us to confront the reality of a hopelessly fragmented field of inquiry

Mey’s own “socially conscious” approach; Verschueren’s proposal for a complete overhaul of p

ragmatics Critique of universalistic presuppositions from a cro

ss-cultural point of view Habermas’s “universal pragmatics”

1.3. The relevance of Mey’s observation

• Mey’s own “socially conscious” approach:

“A decontextualized, non-ambiguous expression may be used to exclude other possible interpretations and contexts. In this way, we may effectively marginalize certain users and their legitimate interpretations and contexts, as when a context-less notion of ‘freedom’ is

employed to exclude those who do not have the means to exercise an alternative conception of

‘freedom’: the poor, the oppressed, the indigenous peoples, and so on” (Mey 2003)

• Verschueren’s new conception of pragmatics 

“there are good reasons to stop using [all those focal points in a 20--30-year history of studying language use] as organizing principles for a book on pragmatics” (Verschueren 2000)

• the cross-cultural critique of the traditional universalistic approach

“Cross-cultural Pragmatics was an attempt to challenge the Gricean and Brown-and-Levinsonian paradigms, and to expose the anglocentric character of various supposedly universal maxims, principles and concepts … 12 years later, it can be said that tide has changed … ” (Wierzbicka 2003)

--- It highlights the quandary facing the c

ommunity of scholars concerned

• Mey’s liberal, inclusive, “anything goes”

attitude creates two difficulties:

1)it threatens to un-discipline a discipline;

2) it resorts to a circularity without indicat

ing a way out.

--- The silver linings of the situation

It affords us a chance 1) to turn circularity into reciprocity, and 2) to turn the mess of incompatible perspectives into a bonanza of available alternatives.

.

“The term ‘paradigm’ enters the preceding pages

early, and its manner of entry is intrinsically

circular. A paradigm is what the members of a

scientific community share, and, conversely, a

scientific community consists of men who share a

paradigm. Not all circularities are vicious . . but

this one is a source of real difficulties. Scientific

communities can and should be isolated without

prior recourse to paradigms; the latter can then be

discovered by scrutinizing the behavior of a given

community’s members” (Kuhn 1970)

2. Self-fashioning through

informed choices

2.1. To discipline, or not to disciplin

e, that is the question:

“Law-abiding citizen” of a discipline, or “f

ree-lance practitioner” in a loosely organiz

ed, multi-faceted, conceptually and theoret

ically diverse studies?

2.2. A rationalist or a pragmatist?

“the biggest single consequence of the re

jection of the Western Rationalistic Tradit

ion is that it makes possible an abandonm

ent of traditional standards of objectivity, t

ruth, and rationality . . .” (John Searle 199

2)

… [the pragmatist comes to] think of himself or herself as . . . capable of as many descriptions as there are purposes to be served. . . . There are as many descriptions as there are uses to which the pragmatist might be put, by his or her self or by others. . . all descriptions . . . are evaluated according to their efficacy as instruments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity to the object described. (R. Rorty 1998)

2.3. A scientist or a bricoleur?

--- bricolage: an improvisatory activity performed by a kind of intellectual jack-of-all-trades with whatever happens to be available; --- to construct a consistent, systematic, coherent perspective or to forge a “perspective by incongruity”;

2.4. a disinterested, objective observer or a cultural and political activist

--- to describe or to prescribe, to inform or to inculcate;--- to offer “thin descriptions” or “thick descriptions”;--- to be apolitical or to seek and promote “pragmatic justice.”