Kommunikativ naturalism : Om den pedagogiska kommunikationens villkor

Sammanfattning: Linguistic communication forms an important part of pedagogical theory and practice. Communication pervades practically all kinds of pedagogic activities, but highly problematic assumptions are commonly made about it. This thesis aims to investigate what a theoretically sustainable and pedagogically fruitful understanding of the conditions of linguistic communication can involve.Its theoretical starting points are principally taken from philosophical theories of linguistic communication, but also from sociological, linguistic and psychological theories. It is primarily Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language and Jürgen Habermas’s sociological theory of speech acts about communicative action that provide the framework for this investigation, discussion and critical examination of assumptions about linguistic communication.This thesis results in a concept of communicative naturalism that provides a framework for understanding the conditions, characteristics, constitutive roles and functions of linguistic communication in schools and society. This kind of understanding, however, differs considerably from a number of common ideas and traditional theories about communication. Assumptions about a common language, coding processes and determinate meanings, or that language represents something in the world, have traditionally played major roles when explaining communication. This thesis provides reasons for believing that communication can rather be understood in terms of indeterminate interpretation processes in which speakers use their own but not private holistically constituted language that does not represent anything at all.Communicative naturalism throws light on the meaning, action and validity dimensions of linguistic communication; and the thesis describes the conditions for communicative understanding and validity, communicative competence, interpretation processes and how linguistic communi¬cation works, the constitutive roles and social functions of communication, what communication as a multidimensional action involves and how three different kinds of knowledge play a key role in all pedagogical communication.The thesis also discusses how a communicative naturalistic understanding compares with current research on pedagogical communication in Sweden and some implications it may have for pedagogical research. It adds to our knowledge of the general terms, conditions and characteristics of pedagogical communication.