This book is the culmination of almost forty years of writing and thinking about speech acts and the use theory of meaning. Chapter 1 sets out and defends a version of the Austin-Searle trichotomy of a sentential act, i.e., uttering a sentence or surrogate, an illocutionary act, i.e., uttering a sentence with a certain "content" as reported by indirect speech, and a perlocutionary act, i.e., producing an effect on an audience by an utterance. Chapter 2 poses the (...) question: what condition C will turn an SA into an IA: F? Perhaps adding a perlocutionary intention to the effect that "U asserts that p only if U utters p with the intention of getting H to believe that p" will meet condition C. Alston argues, contra Schiffer, that it will not. Chapter 3 objects to Searle's analysis of sincere and non-defective promising, on the one hand, because there are too many ways a promise can be defective and, on the other hand, because some of Searle's conditions are not necessary for promising simpliciter. Alston proposes. (shrink)

William P. Alston. difference in the scope of the rule reflects the fact that I-rules exist for the sake of making communication possible. Whereas their cousins are enacted and enforced for other reasons. We could distinguish I-rules just by this ...

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article concerne le rejet controversé de la notion de signification métaphorique par Donald Davidson. Il a deux objectifs: d’abord, de montrer que l’argument de Davidson contre la signification métaphorique est vicié par une ambiguïté qui, une fois révélée, lui ôte toute portée; et deuxièmement, d’expliquer d’où vient cette ambiguïté. L’explication proposée rapporte l’erreur de Davidson au sujet de la signification métaphorique à sa négligence de la notion de signification du locuteur et, plus généralement, à une orientation théorique envers (...) le langage, qui ne s’intéresse, principalement, qu’aux aspects de la communication qui peuvent recevoir un traitement sémantique formel. (shrink)

Donald Davidson holds that metaphors have no linguistic meaning in addition to their literal meaning. Max Black and Frank B. Farrell each contends that Davidson’s view is inconsistent with the fact that metaphors are appropriate objects of explication and evaluation. However, as I show, Davidson’s view actually is entirely consistent with this fact. I also argue that Black’s and Farrell’s own accounts of metaphor imply that sometimes the linguistic meaning of a sentence is other than a (...) product of the meanings of its words and its logical form, and I give a reason why accounts of metaphor with this implication are best rejected. E.M. Zemach, for his part, agrees with Davidson about what metaphors mean, but contends that, on Davidson’s recent account of language and interpretation, all metaphors turn out to be true; metaphors express novel or impractical but nonetheless literally true comparisons or categorizations. Zemach, however, I argue, has neglected the distinction between how speakers actually apply their words to things and their standards of correct application. (shrink)

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids (...) into containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

In this book, Alston articulates and argues for a use-based and normative account of sentence meaning. He proposes that sentence meaning consists in illocutionary act potential, the usability of a sentence for the performance of a certain illocutionary act type. This potential is itself explained in terms of illocutionary rules, normative rules governing the acceptable use of sentences.

This paper proposes a model for implementation of intrinsic natural language sentence meaning in a physical language understanding system, where 'intrinsic' is understood as 'independent of meaning ascription by system-external observers'. The proposal is that intrinsic meaning can be implemented as a point attractor in the state space of a nonlinear dynamical system with feedback which is generated by temporally sequenced inputs. It is motivated by John Searle's well known (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 417–57, 1980) (...) critique of the then-standard and currently still influential computational theory of mind (CTM), the essence of which was that CTM representations lack intrinsic meaning because that meaning is dependent on ascription by an observer_._ The proposed dynamical model comprises a collection of interacting artificial neural networks, and constitutes a radical simplification of the principle of compositional phrase structure which is at the heart of the current standard view of sentence semantics because it is computationally interpretable as a finite state machine. (shrink)

Katz offers such a grammatical account, in which makes it possible for the first time to explain the illocutionary potential of sentences within grammar.

A correlation between Indian linguaphilosophy and Western philosophy of language is possible with regard to the question of meaning – one of the main issues of any linguo-philosophical teaching. The Indian philosophical tradition, represented by orthodox schools, the main of which is the so-called mīmāṃsā, was guided by the authority of sa­cred scripture – the Vedas, and through critical argumentation was engaged in under­standing and interpreting their content, and therefore unique linguo-philosophical ideas were formed. This work presents the ideas (...) of mīmāṃsā, the general picture of which can be formulated as follows: 1) the doctrine joins the theory of the non-human origin of lan­guage as opposed to the theory of convention; 2) a transcendental approach to language is defended, where the eternal, a priori connection of words and meanings is affirmed, which is the opposite of the naturalistic view; 3) an activity-based approach to the mean­ing of statements/sentences is formulated, which is due to the categorical pair sādhya-sid­dha, i.e. “subject to implementation – realized”, in other words, the logic of process-re­sult, founded in the philosophical teaching of mīmāṃsā, and opposed to the logic of sub­ject-predicate, based on the pair of concepts dharma-dharmin, on which other representa­tives of Indian philosophical thought build their teachings. The work also draws parallels between the mīmāṃsā tradition and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition – vyākaraṇa, which allows us to clarify the nature of the linguo-philosophical ideas of the former, and also describes the theories of the meaning of sentences of the medieval mīmāṃsā – an­vitābhidhāna-vāda and abhihitānvaya-vāda. The linguistic philosophy of the mīmāṃsā tradition, and, in particular, the advocacy of a non-naturalistic attitude to language and an activity-based or even pragmatic approach to the interpretation of sentences is unique both for the history of Indian philosophy and from the point of view of the Western tradi­tion of philosophy of language. (shrink)

Indian theories of sentence and its meaning with special reference to grammar (Vyākaraṇa), logic (Nyāya), and ritualism (Mīmāṃsā).

1. Ramsey Sentences and the Function of Theoretical Concepts. In his famous paper “Theories,” Frank Ramsey introduced a technique of examining a scientific theory by means of certain propositions, dubbed later “Ramsey Sentences.” They are the results of what is often called Ramsey elimination. This prima facie elimination is often presented as a method of dispensing with theoretical concepts in scientific theorizing. The idea is this: Assume that we are given a finitely axiomatized scientific theorywhere O1, O2, … are the (...) primitive observation terms of and H1, H2, … its primitive theoretical terms. For simplicity, it will be assumed that is a first-order theory. Since it is finitely axiomatizable, we may think of it as having the form of a single complex proposition, i.e., the conjunction of all the axioms. What can then be done is to generalize existentially with respect to. The result is a sentence of the formIn, the theoretical terms H1, H2, … do not occur any longer. They have been replaced by the variables X1, X2, … bound to initial existential quantifiers. In this sense at least, Ramsey sentences do effect on elimination. Unlike, is not a first-order sentence but a second-order one. (shrink)

It seems to me that the argument has a certain initial plausibility, especially when ‘sentence’, ‘used in isolation’ and ‘meaning in isolation’ are explicated in a certain way. ~For instance, one must take sentences to include elliptical sentences; and one must take ‘use in isolation’ to entail use in the performance of a genuine speech act.! It also seems to me that the argument is important. For one thing, the Conclusion can be recruited in reasoning to the effect (...) that, because.. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

At "Categories" 12b5-16 Aristotle appears to regard the referents of declarative sentences, such as "Socrates is sitting," as what later writers were to call "complexe significabilia," i.e., items such as that Socrates is sitting. Simplicius' discussion of this passage in his commentary on the "Categories" clearly shows the influence of Stoic philosophy of language; but, if we follow the text printed by Kalbfleisch, Simplicius' commentary is seen to be a muddle of Stoic and Aristotelian elements, neither properly understood. It is (...) possible, however, by making a crucial emendation to the text, to preserve the Aristotelian integrity of Simplicius' theory of meaning. On that line Simplicius would be adopting the view that a declarative sentence refers to a thought in the first instance and a "complexe significabile" in the second instance. This view is plausibly the upshot of combining the "Categories" text with the first chapter of "De Interpretatione.". (shrink)