Language and Philosophy, from Frege to the Present

Résumé En

This chapter, by four authors, traces the rise, development, critique, and demise of a diversity of theoretical stances in philosophy and linguistic meaning from 1880-2000, e.g., — modern logic, formal semantics, the linguistic turn in philosophy, truth-conditional semantics, intensional logic, possible world-semantics, categorial (Montague) grammar and ‘generalized quantifiers’; — logical positivism and its critiques, ‘analytic’ statements, ‘radical interpretation’, ‘truth-theoretical semantics’, ‘proof-theoretical semantics’; — psychological accounts of meaning, communitarian agreement; proper names as ‘rigid designators’; reference fixing vs. the properties of a ‘kind’ in all possible worlds; — the ‘cognitive’ era: meaning as a property of mental states (’concepts’), the philosophy of mind, the naturalization program, intentional generalizations with a computationalist view, ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ concepts of meaning, and the functions of informational structures. — Speech Act Theory and pragmatics: ‘ordinary language philosophy’; performance in a context, felicity conditions, intentional and conventional aspects, communicative intentions, conventional meanings, the Cooperative principle, and inferences from conversational implicatures; presumption of rationality, ‘relevance theory’, combining pragmatics and a theory of mind; Discourse Analysis (Birmingham and Geneva School); enunciation theory; intersubjectivity; ‘polyphonic’ notion of subject, argumentative values, scales, and beliefs, Topoi Theory and the ‘theory of semantic blocks’.