Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, "Introduction"

The "pragmatic approach" to language is an attempt to defend the autonomous "calculus conception" of language against apparent problems. The pragmatic approach attempts to handle those problems in the following ways: (1) Indexicality, (2) Speaker meaning; (3) Speech Acts; (4) Presupposition. The basic problem with the pragmatic approach is that it is circular--its application depends on those facts it attempts to explain.