Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

34 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 9 - Implicature and Figurative Speech

  • from Part II - Philosophy of Pragmatics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 196-216

  • Summary

    What declarative, interrogative, or imperative mood indicates is not what the speaker is saying but rather what she is doing in saying what she is saying. Following Searle, we call this the speech act she is performing. Philosophers have focused most of their recent attention to the speech act of assertion, and on its capacity to transfer knowledge. The theory of speech acts attempts to provide a classification of these acts and an account of how hearers recognize them. This is complicated by the very indirect relation between grammatical cues such as mood and the speech act performed on a given occasion and by the fact that apparently we can perform multiple speech acts simultaneously.

  • 7 - Context and Content

  • from Part II - Philosophy of Pragmatics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 165-179

  • Summary

    Much can be learned about conversation by treating it as a cooperative activity in which agents track each other's attitudes and act as if many of these attitudes are shared. What is meant by "sharing" can be modeled using technical ideas that involve iterated attitudes: iterations such as "Speaker 1 accepts that Speaker 2 accepts that Speaker 1 accepts that P." Presupposition, according to pragmatic theories, is fundamentally a kind of conversational acceptance of this sort. Following David Lewis, many other items can be incorporated in the common ground, and this can be used to account for many other features of conversation. This picture is complicated by the accommodation phenomenon. Accommodation challenges the status of pragmatic rules or "rules of conversation," making them appear to have regular and unremarkable exceptions.

  • 5 - Intentionality

  • from Part I - Philosophy of Semantics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 122-148

  • Summary

    The field of linguistic pragmatics owes a great deal to the work of two Oxford philosophers: John Langshaw Austin and Paul Grice. Austin felt that philosophical issues could be illuminated and even transformed by close attention to linguistic evidence, in particular to evidence about word usage. Austin's junior associate Paul Grice shared this interest in linguistic meaning and usage but urged a more critical and theoretical approach

  • 2 - Compositionality

  • from Part I - Philosophy of Semantics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 41-63

  • Summary

    Following Willard V. O Quine and Donald Davidson, philosophers have sometimes suggested that semantic theories should aim at nothing more than assigning truth-conditions to the sentences in a compositional fashion, and the semantic values of subsentential expressions can be anything whatsoever that allows us to get the job done. This chapter argues that semanticists should take a less instrumental view towards the meanings of subsentential expressions and, consequently, that they need to say more about the function of referring expressions and quantifiers within the languages they interpret

  • Introduction

  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    Linguistic semantics can be traced to the work of the logicians Gottlob Frege and Alfred Tarski. Frege was concerned with the logical foundations of mathematics, and Tarski with making logic itself a respectable branch of mathematics. But both contributed insights and developed frameworks that can be applied to natural as well as formal languages

  • 8 - Common Ground and Conversational Update

  • from Part II - Philosophy of Pragmatics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 180-195

  • Summary

    The field of pragmatics is still heavily influenced by the ideas of Paul Grice, but it has been supplemented by accounts capable of making detailed predictions (work on scalar implicatures is an example) and by important new ideas (such as the question under discussion). We can expect more developments of this kind as the burden shifts from philosophy to linguistics and as new modeling techniques from computational linguistics are brought to bear on pragmatic reasoning. Nevertheless, areas of pragmatics remain that are far closer to philosophy than to linguistics. Metaphor and figurative language is one of these; some of the best work on this topic has been done by philosophers more concerned with aesthetics and philosophy of art than with philosophy of language.

  • 10 - Assertion and Other Speech Acts

  • from Part II - Philosophy of Pragmatics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 217-234

  • Summary

    A use theory of meaning seeks to explain linguistic meaning in terms of the practices of a linguistic community. Use theories are motivated by the plausible idea that ultimately, the meanings of words are a matter of how speakers use them, and that changes in usage will produce changes in meaning. Philosophers are attracted by the hope that a use theory might avoid the relentlessly abstract and formal apparatus of logic-based approaches to linguistic meaning. But the gap between words and sentences and between individual usages and community patterns of use is not easily closed.

  • 12 - Externalism and Internalism

  • from Part III - Meaning as a Philosophical Problem
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 258-276

  • Summary

    Logical theories are paradox-ridden. There are solutions to paradoxes of set theory (like the Russell Paradox) and of semantics (like the Liar Paradox), but they are costly. The standard solution to the semantic paradoxes enforces a strict separation of object language and metalanguage, and expects that in cases of interest the metalanguage will be more expressive than the object language. Linguists can be comfortable with this solution, though perhaps philosophers cannot. Paradoxes of vagueness (like the paradox of the heap) are harder to for linguists ignore but can be addressed by accepting the necessity of a certain amount of arbitrary regimentation in the semantics of words. Such regimentation seems to be unavoidable, does little or no harm, and even can support the development of a theory of vagueness.

  • Preface

  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    This chapter illustrates how the areas of linguists known as semantics and pragmatics emerged from issues that were debated in the first half of the twentieth century by analytic philosophers. It describes three debates: (1) Willard V. O. Quine versus Rudolf Carnap on the ontological assumptions of semantics; (2) Bertrand Russell versus Peter Strawson on definiteness and referring; and (3) Alfred J. Ayer versus Peter Geach on the content of ethical statements.

  • 4 - Tense and Modality

  • from Part I - Philosophy of Semantics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 91-121

  • Summary

    For philosophers, linguistic meaning has a great deal to do with mental states and especially with intentional states that are about something. Thoughts about what does in fact not exist are a central problem in the philosophy of mind, and linguistic semantics inherits these problems. The most popular option identifies intentional objects with abstract entities of some sort. It too has puzzling aspects but we show how the most pressing objections against it can be answered. These issues are closely related to questions about the nature of propositions – of the objects of belief and assertion and the primary bearers of truth-value. We canvass philosophical views of propositions and discuss how they relate to linguistic semantics.

  • 3 - Reference and Quantification

  • from Part I - Philosophy of Semantics
  • Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Yale University, Connecticut, Richmond H. Thomason, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Philosophy of Language
    Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018, pp 64-90

  • Summary

    As logicians see them, time and modality are closely related; both involve operators over sets of possibilities that may be ordered in various ways. Tenses and modal verbs both create intensional contexts and provide a showcase for possible worlds semantics. Even though they disagree about the status of possible worlds and past and future times, philosophers agree that they provide an adequate basis for modeling necessity and time. Using times and worlds, linguists have developed highly successful theories of tense, aspect, modal constructions, and conditionals.

Page 1 of 2