Editing Universal pragmatics (section)

==History==
Universal pragmatics (UP) is part of a larger project to rethink the relationship between philosophy and the individual [[science]]s 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]].

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 '[[Analysis|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'.