At the birth of analytic philosophy Frege created a paradigm that is
centrally important to how meaning has been understood in the
twentieth century. Frege invented the now familiar distinctions of
sense and force, of sense and reference, of concept and object. He
introduced the conception of sentence meaning as residing in
truth-conditions and argued that semantics is a normative enterprise
distinct from psychology. Most importantly, he created modern
quantification theory, engendering the idea that the syntactic and
semantic forms of modern logic underpin the meanings of
natural-language sentences. Stephen Barker undertakes to overthrow
Frege's paradigm, rejecting all the above-mentioned features. The
framework he offers is a speech-act-based approach to meaning in which
semantics is entirely subsumed by pragmatics. In this framework:
meaning resides in syntax and pragmatics; sentence-meanings are not
propositions but speech-act types; word-meanings are not objects,
functions, or properties, but again speech-act types; pragmatic
phenomena one would expect not to figure in semantics, such as
pretence, enter into the logical form of sentences; a compositional
semantics is provided by showing how speech-act types combine together
to form complex speech-act types; the syntactic structures invoked are
not those of quantifiers, open sentences, variables, variable-binding,
etc., rather they are structures specific to speech-act forms, which
link logical form and surface grammar very closely. According to
Barker, a natural language - a system of thought - is an emergent
entity that arises from the combination of simple intentional
structures, and certain non-representational cognitive states. It is
embedded in, and part of, a world devoid of normative facts qua
extra-linguistic entities. The world, in which the system is embedded,
is a totality of particular states of affairs. There is no logical
complexity in re; it contains mereological complexity only. Some
truths have truth-makers, but others, logically complex truths, lack
them. Nevertheless, the truth-predicate is univocal in meaning.
Renewing Meaning is a radical, ambitious work which offers to
transform the semantics of natural language.
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A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191532528
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter