Speech—both audible and inaudible—is always speech about something. The subject matter may be natural reality, social reality, or psychic reality (the manifestations of a person's spiritual life exist for us objectively, i. е., outside us and independently of us, and thus form part of reality which we investigate). The epistemological controversy up to this day has been over which element is primitive : language, which creates our image of reality, or reality, which is mirrored, reflected, mapped by language. Two solutions are possible: either the linguistic process is an act of creating an image of reality, or it is an act of mirroring, reflecting, etc.

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Human action is usually based on motivation of some kind. This claim applies to all human action, but what we are here interested in makes us disregard actions in a pathological state (in the broad sense of the word) of the agent. We accordingly disregard not only actions undertaken by people who are ill in the strict sense of the term (e.g. those suffering from mental illness) but also by those whose consciousness has been disturbed by the abuse of alcohol or drugs, by those in a hypnotic state, etc.Motivation may, of course, vary in character and may be marked by a varying share of the underlying cognitive factor (the truth value of which does not interest us here) and the emotional factor, which usually co-occur in the structure of such motivation. Such structures are very intricate because they are based on one's consciously or unconsciously adopted system of values and the resulting system of norms of behavior, the latter covering obligations and prohibitions of societally accepted human behavior. We can disregard here all these details and subtleties (which are interesting from the point of view of the theory of action) and confine ourselves to the general statement that the motivation of human actions, even if it takes on the form of a deliberate and consciously made decision, is conditioned by a number of cognitive and emotional factors. The acting individual usually does not realize all those factors, ranging from the system of values internalized by him to societally transmitted mental schemata and stereotypes, which affect his emotional prejudices, phobias, and predilections. The less a given individual realizes them and the more they admit rationalizations and are disguised as elements with an objective cognitive value, the stronger their impact upon that individual. That is exactly the source of the pragmatic function of stereotypes and their particular strength in that respect.A stereotype is a specific cognitive structure, but just because of that specificity, which consists inter alia in its combining the cognitive and the emotional factor, it is also a specific pragmatic structure, i.e. the element that underlies human action and hence is covered by the theory of human action. The same can be worded thus: stereotypes have their cognitive, emotional,

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