Editing Universal pragmatics (section)

==Goals and methods==
Universal pragmatics is associated with the philosophical method of ''rational reconstruction''.

The basic concern in universal pragmatics is ''utterances'' (or ''[[speech acts]]'') in general.  This is in contrast to most other fields of linguistics, which tend to be more specialized, focusing exclusively on very specific sorts of utterances such as ''sentences'' (which in turn are made up of ''[[word]]s'', ''[[morpheme]]s'', and ''[[phoneme]]s'').

For Habermas, the most significant difference between a sentence and an utterance is in that sentences are judged according to how well they make sense ''grammatically'', while utterances are judged according to their ''communicative validity'' (see section 1). (1979:31)

Universal pragmatics is also distinct from the field of [[sociolinguistics]], because universal pragmatics is only interested in the meanings of utterances ''if they have to do with claims about truth or rightness'', while sociolinguistics is interested in all utterances in their social contexts. (1979:31, 33)