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Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism
Insensitive Semantics is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one.
Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism
Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language
Defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism
Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well
Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism
Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language
Defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism
Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 24, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 13, 2011
About as exciting as the cover suggests.
This book fails to provide a knock down argument for pragmatic accounts of meaning, and provides an even more sketchy argument for speech act pluralism, but in order to built this argument the book does provide a clear and sustained argument to say that more moderate pragmatic accounts must collapse to the more radical pragmatics of philosophers like John Searle and Charles Travis (both of who - incidentally - were students of J.L. Austin)
The book is ultimately extremely narrow in scope and yet not very deep or convincing as such it makes for very stale reading.
This book fails to provide a knock down argument for pragmatic accounts of meaning, and provides an even more sketchy argument for speech act pluralism, but in order to built this argument the book does provide a clear and sustained argument to say that more moderate pragmatic accounts must collapse to the more radical pragmatics of philosophers like John Searle and Charles Travis (both of who - incidentally - were students of J.L. Austin)
The book is ultimately extremely narrow in scope and yet not very deep or convincing as such it makes for very stale reading.
August 2, 2009
Entertaining, raucous criticism of contextualism. Lots to argue with.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews