Reference and the pragmeme

This paper will discuss the linguistic and philosophical problem of reference in relation to the notion of the instantiated pragmatic act or ‘pragmeme’ (see Mey, 2001: 208 ff.). My thesis is that reference is not restricted to the semantics of a language, as many philosophers and linguists have (often implicitly) assumed; rather, the problem is how to relate the language user and his or her language to the situation in which the language is being used—which is the premier issue in all of pragmatics. I will underpin my thesis by recalling what happened some 23 years ago in the field of computerized language processing; particular illustrations may be found in John Searle's audacious thought experiment that became famous by the name of the ‘Chinese Room’, and in the now somewhat dated (and mostly failed) efforts at constructing ‘expert systems’, ES, that were supposed to be able to take over the role of the human expert in many realms of life. I conclude by stating that referring (like indexing) is a specific human, user-oriented activity, which is not subject to a universal, abstract computational, linguistic, or other logic.