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4 - Philosophy of Language and Action Theory

from Part II - Philosophical, Semantic, and Grammatical Approaches to Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2023

By
María de Ponte ,
Kepa Korta  and
John Perry
Edited by
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a part – a very important part – of the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. And, in consequence, the focus has moved from sentences to utterances. It has moved, but not entirely. Not because philosophers and logicians are unaware of utterances, but because the working assumption is that semantics should focus on what all utterances of an expression or sentence have in common, due to meaning, and not on how they differ, due to the particular facts of the utterance. In this chapter we first consider how this assumption has been challenged and express some reservations about alternatives. Then we turn to our own theory, the reflexive-referential theory, which takes utterances as basic to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

Keywords

Utterancereferencemeaningcontentsemanticspragmatics
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context , pp. 95 - 115
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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