Syntax, pragmatics and delocutivity

Pragmatics has difficulty separating itself from its semantic elder, yet according to Carnap’s position, it must do as Jacob did, snatching the birthright from Esau, of the Bible, not by subterfuge but by refusing any interference with worldly reference. The principle at the heart of pragmatics is that its reference does not stop at the extralinguistic world, but by traversing it, achieves a sign-to-sign reference, as Peirce’s theory of interpreters maintains. This is what pragmatics calls sui-referentiality. Our aim in this paper is to show that narrativity and the act of language are one and the same thing, allowing us to say that once the world has been narrativized, the category of the real vanishes like a useless question.