Truth, Force, and Knowledge in Language: Essays on Semantic and Pragmatic Topics

✍ Scribed by Savas L. Tsohatzidis

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 356
• Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book collects twenty-five of the author's essays, each of which addresses a descriptive or a foundational issue that arises at the interface between linguistic semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and the philosophy of language, on the other.

Arranged into three interconnected parts (I. Matters of Meaning and Truth; II. Matters of Meaning and Force; III. Knowledge Matters), the essays suggest that some key topics in the above-mentioned fields have often been approached in ways that considerably underestimate their empirical or conceptual complexity, and attempt to delineate perspectives from which, and conditions under which, an improved understanding of those topics could be sought.

The book will be of interest to linguists working in semantics and pragmatics, and to philosophers working in the philosophy of language and in epistemology.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Matters of meaning and truth
1. Truth ascriptions, falsity ascriptions, and the paratactic analysis of indirect discourse
2. The hybrid theory of mixed quotation
3. Self-reference and the divorce between meaning and truth
4. Performativity and the “true/false fetish”
5. Speaking of truth-telling: The view from wh-complements
6. The distance between “here” and “where I am”
7. A problem for a logic of “because”
8. What “lack” needs to have: A study in the semantics of privation
9. A fake typicality constraint on asymmetric acceptability
10. Correlative and noncorrelative conjunctions in argument and nonargument positions
Part II. Matters of meaning and force
11. Yes–no questions and the myth of content invariance
12. Deontic trouble in speech act botany
13. The gap between speech acts and mental states
14. A purported refutation of some theories of assertion
15. Two consequences of hinting
16. How to test a test for perlocutionary act names
17. Speaker meaning, sentence meaning, and metaphor
18. Voices and noises in the theory of speech acts
19. Searle’s derivation of promissory obligation
20. Searle’s Making the Social World
21. A paradox of cooperation in the theory of implicatures
22. An inferential impasse in the theory of implicatures
Part III. Knowledge matters
23. How to forget that “know” is factive
24. Three problems for the knowledge rule of assertion
25. Grammars as objects of knowledge: The availability of dispositionalism
References
Index