Introducing pragmatics into VVA

摘要

In linguistics and speech-pathology, around 1975 emphasis began to shift from defining language only in terms of form (syntax and phonology) and content (semantics) to defining language in terms of its use (pragmatics), too. Although this shift was so successive that it has been called "the pragmatic revolution", it has been completely ignored in computer science. Since formal languages are a core concept of informatics (programming languages, modeling languages etc.) this ignorance seems at least a little bit strange. Especially in the field of modeling and simulation there are many processes which should be inspected from the view of pragmatics: the description of real world systems in natural language, the structuring, abstraction and idealization of these descriptions with formal languages and the implementation of a formal model with a programming language. This article addresses only one aspect of this "pragmatic gap" in the overall model building process: validation. The result of these investigations can be stated as follows: In order to validate an implemented or conceptual model it is most probably not sufficient to confine the model checking on syntactic and semantic aspects. Therefore a new terminology coining the terms internal (on the level of pragmatics) and external (on the level of semantics) validation is presented. Furthermore, it has been attempted to reveal the dependencies between the three commonly distinguished model types (conceptual, formal and executable) on all of their three semiotic levels (syntax, semantics, pragmatics).