Provides a survey of the development of speech act theory from Aristotle through Reid and Peirce to Edmund Husserl, Anton Marty, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and finally to Austin and Searle. A special role is played by Husserl's theory of objectifying acts (meaning, roughly, acts of naming or stating) and of the efforts by his followers to extend this theory to cover phenomena such as questioning and commanding. These efforts culminated in the work of Adolf Reinach, who developed the first (...) systematic theory of speech acts in connection with his monograph of 1913 on “The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law”. (shrink)

This paper takes indexicality as a case-study for critical examination of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as currently conceived in mainstream philosophy of language. Both a ‘pre-indexical’ and ‘post-indexical’ analytic formal semantics are examined and found wanting, and instead an argument is mounted for a ‘properly pragmatist pragmatics’, according to which we do not work out what signs mean in some abstract overall sense and then work out to what use they are being put; rather, we must understand to (...) what use signs are being put in order to work out what they mean. (shrink)

In this contribution we focus on one phenomenon that has a special role in pragmatic theorizing, namely metaphor, and select two issues deriving from theoretical models and prone to be tested experimentally. The first issue concerns the comprehension procedure, that is whether access to metaphorical meaning goes through a mandatory literal stage and thus is indirect, as predicted by a Gricean inspired account, or rather is retrieved directly. The question will be discussed by referring to behavioral and neurophysiological studies, which (...) advanced our understanding of the time course of metaphorical interpretation but proved not fully suitable to answer the question. The second issue revolves around the cognitive architecture of the pragmatic system as it operates in the case of metaphor comprehension. We will illustrate the contribution that functional neuroimaging, coupled with clinical investigations can provide to fine-tune the architecture of the system responsible for metaphor processing. Some outstanding questions are highlighted in the final part, aiming at sketching our interpretation of the experimental pragmatic enterprise. (shrink)

This chapter probes the connections between the metaphysics of meaning and the investigation of human communication. It first argues that contemporary philosophy of mind has inherited most of its metaphysical questions from Brentano's puzzling definition of intentionality. Then it examines how intentionality came to occupy the forefront of pragmatics in three steps. By investigating speech acts, Austin and ordinary language philosophers pioneered the study of intentional actions performed by uttering sentences of natural languages. Based on his novel concept of speaker's (...) meaning and his inferential view of human communication as a cooperative and rational activity, Grice developed a three-tiered model of the meaning of utterances: the linguistic meaning of the uttered sentence; the explicit truth-conditional content of the utterance; the implicit content conveyed by the utterance. Finally, the new emerging truth-conditional trend in pragmatics urges that not only the implicit content conveyed by an utterance but its explicit content as well depends on the speaker's communicative intention. (shrink)

From a pragma-dialectical perspective, argumentation rules do not receive their normative import from any "metaphysical necessity." They are, pragmatically speaking, binding only to the extent that reasonable participants regard them as useful for res olving disputes. This may be misleading with regard to the second pragma-dialectical rule relating to the burden of proof. If the obligation to defend a proffered standpoint is a constitutive rule of competent speech, then the obligation denoted by the burden of proof is more binding upon (...) speakers than a pragmatic approach to the subject would have us believe. (shrink)

Pragmatic information,understood as the impact of a message upon a receiving system,represents a matured and comprehensive concept of which earlier proposals are special cases.The di .erent kinds of recipients and reactions to incoming message are characterized.In a historical exposition the principal approaches to the definition and operationalization of information are critically reviewed. From a modern point of view,the measurement of pragmatic information is possible but requires novel and specific procedures.As a perspective notion,pragmatic information will be analyzed in its relationships with (...) other perspective notions,particularly 'meaning' and 'interpretation '.Main fields of application include physics, general systems theory and cognitive science.Together with some reflections on information and meaning, these areas of application point forward to connections with the mind-matter problem. (shrink)

One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm (...) that should not be subsumed either under semantics or pragmatics, but may be labeled "prepragmatics". My ultimate goal is to put forward and defend a novel picture of our language architecture, according to which: semantic content is strictly poorer than the lexically encoded content (and therefore does not involve any contextually determined material - not even the reference of demonstratives); pragmatic mechanisms require being able to reason about one's beliefs and intentions and do not affect truth-conditions or truth-value; and, finally, there is a distinct prepragmatic level, which takes into account various kinds of contextual information and makes it possible to evaluate a sentence (as used on a particular occasion) for a truth value. I shall take as a case study, one of the "stumbling stones" in the semantics-pragmatics literature: the case of demonstrative reference. The upshot will be to show that if there is indeed room for a family of linguistic phenomena that are neither semantic nor yet fully pragmatic, the resolution of demonstrative reference is a candidate par excellence to belong there. (shrink)

The paper tries to separate two opposite features of natural languages. Plato was first who had noticed both of them. The one characteristic of languages, well known to the logicians and all scientists consists in the capability of languages to name things and to define meanings and accordingly to communicate positive ideas and unambiguous concepts explicitely. The second characteristic connected with the evolutionary features of natural languages is the problematic one. It is relatively hidden and for us it is not (...) easy to observe its nature. It rests upon the operation of the delimitation of ideas during the process of understandings – the meanings of expressions are established and the expressions of meanings are chosen on the background of others expressions and meanings in the whole matter of language. In this paper the second feature of languages is demonstrated by means of Ferdinand de Saussure´s Cours de linguistique générale. It is claimed that de Saussure´s conception of the ‘value’ is comparable with Quine´s the indeterminacy of translation. (shrink)