Metapragmatics, Hidden Assumptions, and Moral Economy

Jakob Mey (Pragmatics: an introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993) differentiates between ‘micropragmatics’ and ‘macropragmatics’, and suggests that the latter can be understood in two ways: ‘an extensional way of simply enlarging the units we’re looking at’ in terms of either co-text or context, or ‘digging down’ to ‘the intensional base of pragmatics, putting emphasis on those factors that, albeit not explicitly expressed in any text, still determine the form of that text in ways that are difficult to analyse, or even see, with the naked eye’. The latter amounts to the ‘eternal question of “whose language” we’re speaking, and why’. It might be called ‘metapragmatics’, meaning ‘reflections on the language users’ use’. He pinpoints as ‘reflections on the user’s use’ the ‘hidden assumptions’ or ‘presuppositions’ of language in, for instance, education, the media, or medicine. I shall discuss the metapragmatic issue of hidden assumptions with particular reference to ‘moral economy’. Sayer (Moral economy. www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/sayer-moral-economy.pdf. Accessed 15 Oct 2015, 2004) refers to a return to the belief shared by Aristotle and Adam Smith that ‘the economic cannot be understood in abstraction from the social and the cultural’. ‘Moral economy’ is ‘the study of how economic activities of all kinds are influenced and structured by moral dispositions and norms’.