Practical Language:Its Meaning and Use.

[摘要] I demonstrate that a ;;speech act;; theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims.LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE!φ;;s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF).IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL!φ;;s CDF is to express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent;;s preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs.Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny a sentence;;s linguistic meaning is a matter of its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of ;;static;; properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative ;;shut the window!;; might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut.Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like).I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Formal Semantics

[关键词] Imperatives;Formal Semantics;Conditionals;Speech Acts;Expressivism;Philosophy;Humanities;Philosophy