PRAGMATICS

Charles François (2004). PRAGMATICS, International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, 2(2): 2601.

Collection	International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics
Year	2004
Vol. (num.)	2(2)
ID	◀ 2601 ▶
Object type	Epistemology, ontology or semantics

“The theory of the relations between thesigns and their users”(D. GERNERT, 2000a) p. 156)

According to GERNERT: “From the very beginning, pragmatic information has been characterized by the ”property to change the receiving system“(quoted from KORNWACHS and von LUCADOU, 1982) or more formally, by the property to alter structure and/or behavior of the receiving system”

He adds: “Two constituents of pragmatic information are termed ”novelty“ and ”confirmation “. A message only repeating well known stuff contains no novelty and hence no pragmatic information (here again, a comparison with syntactic information is worthwhile). On the other hand, a message in an unknown foreignlanguage can bring about no impact upon a receiver -it carries no ”confirmation“, that is, no relation to the receiver's state of knowledge , predisposition, or information requirement. Pragmatic information requires both novelty and a concrete relation to the receiver's predisposition: the amount of pragmatic information will rise as novelty and/or confirmation increase”(Ibid p. 159-60)

See also