Chapter 60: Pragmatics as Update Calculus

Speech acts are not peripheral additions to semantics but categorical operations on shared discourse states. This chapter formalizes pragmatics as an update calculus: each utterance is an endofunctor on the category of discourse states, transforming the shared context of speaker and hearer. Austin’s performatives, Searle’s taxonomy, and Grice’s conversational maxims are reinterpreted within this framework. The commitment register ℝeg_C enters the linguistic domain through performative speech acts—utterances that constitute the acts they describe.