• Complain

Stephen J. Barker - Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach

Here you can read online Stephen J. Barker - Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2004, publisher: Clarendon Press, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Stephen J. Barker Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach
  • Book:
    Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Clarendon Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2004
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Stephen Barker sets out and defends a radically new semantic theory, and shows how it solves notable problems in the philosophy of language. According to the theory, linguistic meaning should be understood in terms of speech acts, and the fundamental bearer of truth is not a proposition but an assertion. Barker sets this theory in a broader philosophical framework, including a simple, common-sense ontology and an account of pre-linguistic mental representation. This is an ambitious, rich, and original view of language and its world.

Stephen J. Barker: author's other books


Who wrote Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Barker Stephen J Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Nottingham Renewing - photo 1
Barker, Stephen J , Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Nottingham
Renewing Meaning
A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach
Print ISBN 0199263663, 2004
doi:10.1093/0199263663.001.0001
Abstract: This book develops an alternative approach to sentence- and word-meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretic approach, or STA. Instead of employing the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic-principally, quantification theory-to construct semantic theories, STA employs speech-act structures. The structures it employs are those postulated by a novel theory of speech-acts. STA develops a compositional semantics in which surface grammar is integrated with semantic interpretation in a way not allowed by standard quantification-based theories. It provides a pragmatic theory of truth, a treatment of logically complex discourse as expressive cognitive states, and a background metaphysics in which the world is a totality of logically simple states of affairs. The book also puts forward an account of how intentional states provide the simple, representational foundation for a superstructure of speech-act structures-a system of thoughts-that far outruns the expressive power of the intentional foundation. In short, it provides an account of cognitive foundations of a language and a naturalistic reduction of semantics through an expressive theory of semantic norms.
Keywords: compositional,expression,intention,pragmatic,proto-act,pronoun quantification,speech act,truth,representation
Renewing Meaning
end p.i
end p.ii
Renewing Meaning
A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach
CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD
end p.iii
Picture 2

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox 2 6 dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
So Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Stephen J. Barker 2004
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0-19-926366-3
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
end p.iv
To My Parents
end p.v
end p.vi
PREFACE
Frege created a paradigm that is centrally important to how meaning was understood in the twentieth century. It includes the now familiar distinctions of sense and force, of sense and reference, of concept and object, the conception of sentence-meaning as residing in truth-conditions, and the view that semantics is a normative enterprise distinct from psychology. Most importantly, it proposes that the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic, quantification theory, underpin the meanings of natural-language sentences. Frege's paradigm might seem to be a permanent fixture in semantic theory. Nevertheless, in this book, I undertake to overthrow it. I offer an alternative that rejects the sense/force distinction, truth-conditional semantics, anti-psychologism, and, most importantly, the idea that quantification theory has anything to do with the structure of reference and generality in natural languages.
The framework I describe is a speech-act-based approach to meaning in which semantics is entirely subsumed by pragmatics. I call this framework the speech-act theoretic approach, or STA. In STA, meaning resides in syntax and pragmatics; the familiar creatures of semantics, such as propositions or truth-conditions, have no role to play in semantic theory. STA conceives of sentence-meanings not as propositions but as speech-act types. It conceives of word-meanings not as objects, functions, or properties, but again as speech-act types. Pragmatic phenomena one would expect not to figure in semantics, such as pretence, enter into the logical form of sentences. STA offers a compositional semantics by showing how speech-act types combine together to form complex speech-act types. Moreover, the syntactic structures that STA invokes are not those of quantifiers, open sentences, variables, variable-binding, and so on. Rather they are structures specific to speech-act forms. This new kind of syntax explains why surface grammar has the form it does, and views logical form as closely aligned with itan explanatory virtue lacking in standard treatments.
Isn't a speech-act approach doomed to circularity? It appeals to speech acts. These are underpinned by intentions, and intentions have contents, which in turn must be explained by semantics. My reply to this charge is that intentions have contents, but they are of a different and more primitive kind than the contents of thoughts. The relation of intention to fully-fledged thought is that intentional states provide the simple, representational foundation for a superstructure of speech acts and modesa superstructure that far outruns the expressive power of that foundation. In STA, semantics is a branch of psychology: psychology and semantics cannot be prized apart. How do we account for the
end p.vii
normative aspect of meaning? STA proposes an expressivist reduction of the normative. The word is prior to norms; norms are not prior to words.
In outline then, according to this book, a natural languagea system of thoughtis an emergent entity that arises from the combination of simple intentional structures, articulated symbolic media, and certain non-representational cognitive states. It is embedded in, and part of, a world devoid of normative facts qua extra-linguistic entities. The system's structures have little in common with those found in formal languages based on Frege's paradigm. Finally, the world, in which the system is embedded, is a totality of particular states of affairs. There is no logical complexity in re; the world contains mereological complexity only.
Some of the core structural proposals for this book emerge from my Ph.D. thesis, submitted in 1995 at the University of Melbourne. But there have been many developments since then. I would like to thank the following people who have helped me in many and varied ways: John Bigelow, Thomas Bull, Phil Dowe, Maite Escurdia, Karen Green, Allen Hazen, Richard Holton, Lloyd Humberstone, Terry Horgan, Max Klbel, Bill Lycan, Oskar Manhal, Samir Okasha, Graeme Oppy, Graeme Rhook, Rupert Sumerton, Mario Gomez Torrente, Elvira Schnabel, Brian Weatherson. I owe a particular dept of gratitude to Patrick Emerton, with whom I have engaged in a lot of discussion about the contents of this book, and other things besides, and who read earlier drafts of this work. I thank two anonymous OUP readers for their comments, the OUP Philosophy editor, Peter Momtchiloff, and Rebecca Bryant and Hilary Walford. I thank John Gorvett, who read through the final draft of this work. I gratefully acknowledge the support of UNAM, where I was a postdoctoral fellow, and the Australian Research Council for support at Monash University, where I was a postdoctoral fellow, and at the University of Tasmania. I thank the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham for their support. I thankfully acknowledge Kluwer Academic publishers for permission to reproduce sections of 'E-type Pronouns, DRT, Dynamic Semantics and the Quantifier/Variable-binding Model',
Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach»

Look at similar books to Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach»

Discussion, reviews of the book Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.