The Concept of Law is one of the most influential texts in English-language jurisprudence. 50 years after its first publication its relevance has not diminished and in this third edition, Leslie Green adds an introduction that places the book in a contemporary context, highlighting key questions about Hart's arguments and outlining the main debates it has prompted in the field. The complete text of the second edition is replicated here, including Hart's Postscript, with fully updated notes to include modern references (...) and further reading. (shrink)

According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it (...) an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. The (...) book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The author discusses a number of issues in the theory of legal sources. The first topic is whether sources should be conceived of as acts or texts. The alternatives are connected with two competing theories of legal interpretation (viz., the cognitive theory and the sceptical theory), which entail different concepts of legal rules and law‐making. The second topic is whether a “formal” or a “material” criterion of recognition of sources should be preferred. The third section is devoted to the analysis (...) of rules of change. Four theories of rules of change are discussed, and five kinds of such rules are distinguished. The fourth section concerns judicial law‐making, with special reference to the creation of new legal rules by constitutional courts. (shrink)

Testimony is an indispensable source of information. Yet, contrary to ‘literalism’, speakers rarely mean just what they say; and even when they do, that itself is something the hearer needs to realize. So, understanding instances of testimony requires more than merely reading others' messages off of the words they utter. Further, a very familiar and theoretically well-entrenched approach to how we arrive at such understanding serves to emphasize, not merely how deeply committed we are to testimony as a reliable source (...) of information, but that epistemological questions about testimonial belief are – perhaps even must be – posterior to such a commitment. This result does not itself dictate any particular views on the epistemology of testimony. However, not only does the failure of literalism not support the view that the justificatory basis of testimony-based beliefs is importantly inferential; it in fact undermines a key premise in one important argument for the view that one needs independent, positive reasons for accepting a given testimonial report. More generally, the present paper illustrates how discussions of the epistemology of testimony might usefully interact with an examination of the epistemology of understanding. (shrink)

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is easier to apply than to explain. Explaining it is complicated by the fact that many conflicting formulations have been proposed over the past sixty years. This might suggest that there is no one way of drawing the distinction and that how to draw it is merely a terminological question, a matter of arbitrary stipulation. In my view, though, these diverse formulations, despite their conflicts, all shed light on the distinction as it is commonly (...) applied, in both linguistics and philosophy. Although it is generally clear what is at issue when people apply the distinction to specific linguistic phenomena, what is less clear, in some cases anyway, is whether a given phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic, or both. Fortunately, there are other phenomena that are uncontroversially semantic or, as the case may be, uncontroversially pragmatic. Their example will help us get clear on what the semantics-pragmatics distinction is. (shrink)

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication.

The Concept of Law is the most important and original work of legal philosophy written this century. First published in 1961, it is considered the masterpiece of H.L.A. Hart's enormous contribution to the study of jurisprudence and legal philosophy. Its elegant language and balanced arguments have sparked wide debate and unprecedented growth in the quantity and quality of scholarship in this area--much of it devoted to attacking or defending Hart's theories. Principal among Hart's critics is renowned lawyer and political philosopher (...) Ronald Dworkin who in the 1970s and 80s mounted a series of challenges to Hart's Concept of Law. It seemed that Hart let these challenges go unanswered until, after his death in 1992, his answer to Dworkin's criticism was discovered among his papers. In this valuable and long-awaited new edition Hart presents an Epilogue in which he answers Dworkin and some of his other most influential critics including Fuller and Finnis. Written with the same clarity and candor for which the first edition is famous, the Epilogue offers a sharper interpretation of Hart's own views, rebuffs the arguments of critics like Dworkin, and powerfully asserts that they have based their criticisms on a faulty understanding of Hart's work. Hart demonstrates that Dworkin's views are in fact strikingly similar to his own. In a final analysis, Hart's response leaves Dworkin's criticisms considerably weakened and his positions largely in question. Containing Hart's final and powerful response to Dworkin in addition to the revised text of the original Concept of Law, this thought-provoking and persuasively argued volume is essential reading for lawyers and philosophers throughout the world. (shrink)

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for (...) a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements (lexical and syntactic) which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference. (shrink)

I’ve known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I’ve known Larry. In 1967 I read Grice’s “Logical and Conversation” in mimeograph, shortly after his William James lectures, and I read its precursor “(Implication),” section III of “The Causal Theory of Perception”, well before that. And I’ve thought, read, and written about implicature off and on ever since. Nevertheless, I know a lot less about it than Larry does, and that’s not even taking into account everything he has uncovered about (...) what was said on the subject long before Grice, even centuries before. So, now that I’ve betrayed my ignorance, I’ll display my insolence. I’m going to identify the most pervasive and pernicious misconceptions about implicature that I’ve noticed over the years. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery (...) of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning). (shrink)

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker (...) meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied. (shrink)

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (1958) are (...) his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (1958) are his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and (...) directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

This fresh look at the philosophy of language focuses on the interface between a theory of literal meaning and pragmatics--a philosophical examination of the relationship between meaning and language use and its contexts. Here, Atlas develops the contrast between verbal ambiguity and verbal generality, works out a detailed theory of conversational inference using the work of Paul Grice on Implicature as a starting point, and gives an account of their interface as an example of the relationship between Chomsky's Internalist Semantics (...) and Language Performance. Atlas then discusses consequences of his theory of the Interface for the distinction between metaphorical and literal language, for Grice's account of meaning, for the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, for Meaning Holism, and for Formal Semantics of Natural Language. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophy of language and will appeal to philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

I am often asked to explain the difference between my notion of impliciture (Bach 1994) and the relevance theorists’ notion of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Carston 2002). Despite the differences between the theoretical frameworks within which they operate, the two notions seem very similar. Relevance theorists describe explicatures as “developments of logical forms,” whereas I think of implicitures as “expansions” or “completions” of semantic contents (depending on whether or not the sentence’s semantic content amounts to a proposition). That is (...) not much of a difference. We agree that implicitures/explicatures go beyond what is said (in a strict sense) and yet fall short of being implicatures. So, what is the difference, or is it just terminological? As we will see, the real differences emerge when the two notions are situated in their respective theoretical frameworks with their contrasting conceptions of what is involved in linguistic communication. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful (...) distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions. (shrink)

This article is a continuation of a line of investigation I began in ‘Literal Meaning’. Its aim is to explore some of the relations between the meaning of words and sentences and the context of their utterance. The view I shall be challenging is sometimes put by saying that the meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has independently of any context whatever — the meaning it has in the so-called „null context“. The view I shall be espousing (...) is that in general the meaning of a sentence only has application (it only, for example, determines a set of truth conditions) against a background of assumptions and practices that are not representable as a part of the meaning. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. The (...) book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)