Pragmatics Quotes

“Radical Pragmatics – “words are fluid, and can mean different things in different circumstances. […] And what we draw upon in memory is not a lexicon of definitions but a network of associations among words and the kinds of events and actors they typically convey.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”
― Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering