Can we say what we mean?: Expressibility and background

2013

The aim of this paper is to discuss a basic assumption tacitly shared by many philosophers of mind and language: that whatever can be meant, can be said. It specifically targets John Searle’s account of this idea, focussing on his Principle of Expressibility (PE henceforth). In the first part of the paper, PE is exposed underlining its analyticity (1) and its relevance for the philosophy of language (2), mind (3), society and action (4). In the critical part, the notion of Background is taken into account in order to re-evaluate two basic distinctions: the one between sentence and utterance meanings (5), and the one between native and type speakers (6). PE is reconsidered in the light of the previous arguments as a methodological strategy that does not prevent uses of language from eventual semantic excesses and deficits (7), and a complementary Principle of Expression Fallibility is finally proposed (8).

Language is man’s unique tool for communication. The practical use of this complex tool is guided by meaning-determining factors, conversation-internally or otherwise. This is natural language. Therefore, a theory which accounts for natural language must: establish the creation of meaning relations; then account for the communicative roles of these relations in various situations on universal, extra-linguistic grounds. Only this is an exhaustive theory of language use. Considering these, I opine that such a theory operates on a context-semantic interface. The theory, while acknowledging that, unlike metalanguages, natural language is both a linguistic and extralinguistic system of communication, is bound to locate utterances in universal situations. What I therefore undertake in this essay is; place Searle’s (1975) taxonomy of illocutionary acts on a semantic scale, where I consider them as effective communicative delivery of speaker intentions. I then place them on a context scale, where I consider them as adequate or otherwise both in universal and contextual instances. I have chosen Searle (1975), because his illocutionary acts are the immediate intentional content of (his proposed) speech acts. I have also largely brought in Dascal (2003) who vividly describes the taxonomy in natural instances. I find that the taxonomy is largely inadequate in a natural, context-based communicative environment. And that a more but not entirely functional alternative would be more qualified in these situations.

… of Language: Force, Meaning, and Mind, 2007

John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning, and Mind This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth conditional versus non-truth conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning skepticism in relation to rule-following, and the proper characterization of ''what is said'' in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area.

S.-J. Conrad und K. Petrus (Hg.): Meaning, Context, and Methodology. Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2017

Despite being a pragmatic theory of language, Searle’s theory of speech acts is methodologically based on semantic analysis. The properties of speech acts are supposed to be examined by analysing sentences whose literal utterance is sufficient to constitute a specific speech act by virtue of their semantic meaning. Searle’s method thus presupposes the concept of fixable, constant semantic content. Searle also advocates a very radical hypothesis about the dependence of the meaning of a speech act on the mental context of a speaker. The aim of the paper is to show that there is a serious clash between the methodological presupposition of constant semantic content and the thesis of the pervading influence of context on speech act meaning. In fact, if one takes up a contextualist stance as radical as Searle’s, semantic content cannot be taken as fixable and constant. Therefore, the preferred method of semantic analysis is by no means available.

The development of pragmatics proved to be a significantly important achievement that countered or balanced some of the apparently outlandish claims of truth functional semantics. Nonetheless, such engagements with almost a culture of making counter claims meant that pragmatics itself remained entangled with some of the presumptions underlying truth functional semantics. This essay therefore revisits the ‘primal’ scene of communication and undertakes a review of literature so as to critique the extant development of traditional pragmatics (vis-à-vis Austin, Grice, and Searle’s work) and suggests plausible contemporary alternatives for further development of the field.

2007

Copula, 2011

Grice characterizes the speaker meaning in terms of intentionality while Searle criticizes Grice that he has not examined the notion of intentionality. This paper argues that the analysis of intentionality implicitly subsists in the Grician account of meaning. To support this, the aim of this paper is to show that in different types of speech act, the Grician account successfully explains the two aspects of intentionality-the representation intention and the communication intention.

Res Cogitans

John Searle has long argued that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. In his view the capacity of speech acts to represent and relate to reality derives from more biologically basic forms of intentionality, such as perception and action, which initially evolved to relate organisms directly to their environments. Searle’s naturalistic model of language, in order to be complete, requires a theory of how perception and action specifically give rise to linguistic meaning and interpretation. In this paper I argue that recent theoretical developments in cognitive linguistics and the emerging field of embodied cognition provide the needed empirical support for Searle’s perception-based account of linguistic intentionality. In particular I show how the related theses of embodied simulation, perceptual symbols theory, and Arthur Glenberg’s indexical hypothesis corroborate Searle’s semantic naturalism. The result is a model in which body, mind, world, and language comprise integrated aspects of a dynamic whole. Keywords: language, intentionality, semantics, embodied cognition, perceptual symbols, affordances, speech acts, cognitive linguistics, embodied simulation.

2002

2016