2004 LiteralMeaning

• (Recanati, 2004) ⇒ François Récanati. (2004). “Literal Meaning." Cambridge University Press. ISBN:0521537363,

Notes

• It investigates Utterance Content.
• It suggests that Utterance Content is affected by Context in ways beyond what is linguistically determined by the ordinary syntax and semantics of Chomsky, Montague and Grice.

Quotes

Book overview

• According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents (such as truth-conditions) 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' (as opposed to merely implied) 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.

Introduction (p.1).

• Central in the ideal language tradition has been the equation of, or at least the close connection between, the meaning of a (declarative) sentence and its truth-conditions. The truth-conditional approach to meaning is perpetuated, to a large extent, in contemporary formal semantics. A language is viewed as a system of rules or conventions, in virtue of which certain assemblages of symbols count as well-formed, meaningful sentences. The meaning of a sentence (or of any complex symbol) is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. The meaning of a simple symbols is the conventional assignment of a worldly entity to that symbols: for examples, names are assigned objects, monadic predicates are assigned properties or sets of objects, and so on. The meaning of a declarative sentence, determined by the meanings of its constituents and the way they are put together, is equated with its truth-condition. For example, the subject-predicate construction is associated with a semantic rule for determining the truth conditions for a subject-predicate sentence on the basis of the meaning assigned to the subject and that assigned to the predicate.
• This truth-conditional approach to meaning is one of the things which ordinary language philosophers found quite unpalatable. According to them, reference and truth cannot be ascribed to linguistic expressions in abstraction from their use. In vacuo, words do not refer and sentences do not have truth-conditions. Words-world relations are established through, and indissociable from, the use of language. It is therefore misleading to construe the meaning of a word as some worldly entity that it represents or, more generally, as its truth-conditional contribution. The meaning of a word, insofar as there is such as thing, should rather be equated with tits use-potential or its use-conditions. In any case, what must be studied primarily is speech: the activity of saying things. Then we will be in a position to understand language, the instrument we use is speech. Austin's theory of speech acts and Grice's theory of speaker's meaning were both meant to provide the foundation for a theory of language, or at least for a theory of linguistic meaning.
• Despite the early antagonisms I have just described, semantics (the formal study of meaning and truth-condition) and pragmatics (the study of language in use) are now conceived of as complementary disciplines, shedding light on different aspects of language.

---

,

	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2004 LiteralMeaning	Francois Recanati			Literal Meaning			http://books.google.com/books?id=ItPyx3ftrIIC			2004