Abstract
Until recently, pragmatics — the study of language in relation to the users of language — has been the neglected member of the traditional three-part division of the study of signs: syntax, semantics, pragmatics. The problems of pragmatics have been treated informally by philosophers in the ordinary language tradition, and by some linguists, but logicians and philosophers of a formalistic frame of mind have generally ignored pragmatic problems, or else pushed them into semantics and syntax. My project in this paper is to carve out a subject matter that might plausibly be called pragmatics and which is in the tradition of recent work in formal semantics. The discussion will be programmatic. My aim is not to solve the problems I shall touch on, but to persuade you that the theory I sketch has promise. Although this paper gives an informal presentation, the subject can be developed in a relatively straightforward way as a formal pragmatics no less rigorous than present day logical syntax and semantics. The subject is worth developing, I think, first to provide a framework for treating some philosophical problems that cannot be adequately handled within traditional formal semantics, and second to clarify the relation between logic and formal semantics and the study of natural language.
The research for and preparation of this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation, grant number GS-2574. I would like to thank Professors David Shwayder and Richmond Thomason for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
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References
Charles W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago 1938, pp. 4–5.
Rudolf Carnap, Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Chicago 1939, p. 4.
See Dana Scott, ‘Advice on Modal Logic’ in Philosophical Problems in Logic. Recent Developments (ed. by Karel Lambert), D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht 1970, pp. 143–173.
This is not an inevitable strategy. Instead of taking individuals and possible worlds as primitive, defining properties and relations as functions from one to the other, one might take individuals, properties and relations as primitive and define possible worlds in terms of these.
A theory of possible worlds and propositions defined in terms of them is not committed to any absolute notion of synonymy or analyticity. Since propositions are functions taking possible worlds as arguments, a domain of possible worlds must be specified as the domain of the function. But the domain need not be all possible worlds in any absolute or metaphysical sense. We may leave open the possibility that the domain may be extended as our imaginations develop, or as discoveries are made, or as our interests change. Propositional identity is, of course, relative to the specification of a domain of possible worlds.
This is not necessarily so, however. Since speech act types can be any way of picking out a class of particular speech acts, one might define one in such a way that the context was irrelevant, and the problem of analysis reduced to a problem of syntax or semantics, as for example the speech act of uttering a grammatical sentence of English, or the speech act of expressing the proposition X.
R. Montague, ‘Pragmatics’ in Contemporary Philosophy — La philosophie contemporaine (ed. by R. Klibansky), La Nuova Italia Editrice, Florence 1968, Vol. I, pp. 102–122. Montague uses the phrase ‘point of reference’ as does Dana Scott in the paper mentioned in note 3.
Tenses and times, for example, are an interesting case. Does a tensed sentence determine a proposition which is sometimes true, sometimes false, or does it express different timeless propositions at different times? I doubt that a single general answer can be given, but I suspect that one’s philosophical views about time may be colored by his tendency to think in one of these ways or the other.
Bas C. van Fraassen, ‘Singular Terms, Truth Value Gaps, and Free Logic’, Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966) 481–495
and van Fraassen, ‘Presupposition, Implication, and Self Reference’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968) 136–151.
Keith Donnellan, ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966) 281–304.
See R. Thomason and R. Stalnaker, ‘Modality and Reference’, Noûs 2 (1968) 359–372
and R. Stalnaker and R. Thomason, ‘Abstraction in First Order Modal Logic’, Theoria 34 (1968) 203–207.
See R. Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’ in Studies in Logical Theory (ed. by Nicholas Rescher), Oxford 1968, pp. 98–112 for a semantical theory of conditional propositions. Nuel Belnap has developed a theory of conditional assertion in ‘Conditional Assertion and Restricted Quantification’, Noûs 4 (1970).
J. O. Urmson, ‘Parenthetical Verbs’, Mind 61 (1952) 192–212.
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© 1972 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Stalnaker, R.C. (1972). Pragmatics. In: Davidson, D., Harman, G. (eds) Semantics of Natural Language. Synthese Library, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_11
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