What Is Said: A Theory of Indirect Speech Reports

ISBN-13: 9780792307921 / Angielski / Twarda / 1990 / 254 str.

Rod Bertolet; R. Bertolet

Opis

The notion of what someone says is, perhaps surprisingly, some- what less clear than we might be entitled to expect. Suppose that I utter to my class the sentence 'I want you to write a paper reconciling the things Russell claims about propositions in The Philosophy of Mathematics for next week'. A student who was unable to get up in time for class that day asks another what I said about the assignment. Several replies are in the offing. One, an oratio recta or direct speech report, is 'He said, "I want you to write a paper reconciling the things Russell claims about propositions in The Philosophy of Mathematics for next week. '" Another, an oratio obliqua or indirect speech report, consists in the response 'He said that he wants us to write a paper reconciling . . . '. Yet another, reflecting a perhaps accurate estimate of the task involved, editorializes: 'He said he wants us to do the impossible'. Or, aware of both this and my quaint custom of barring those who have not successfully completed the assignment from the classroom, one might retort 'He said he doesn't want to meet next week'. Since 'says' is construable in these various ways, it is at best unhelpful to write something like 'Alice said "Your paper is two days late," thereby saying that Tom's paper was two days late.

Spis treści

1: Approaches to Natural Language.- 1. Sentences and Saying.- 2. Saying and Semantics.- 3. Saving Sentences, and What Is Said.- 4. Sentences and Propositions.- 2: Indexicality.- 1. Indexical Expressions.- 2. Some Examples.- 3. Too Many Indexicals?.- 4. The Eliminability of Indexicals.- 5. Russell’s Theory of Descriptions.- 3: Alternate Approaches.- 1. The Role of Context.- 2. Donnellan, Sentence Meaning and Speaker Meaning.- 3. The Demonstrative ’The’.- 4: Prolegomenon to a Theory of Speaker Reference.- 1. Two Approaches to Reference.- 2. Desiderata For A Theory of Speaker References.- 3. The Causal Theory.- 4. A Further Constraint.- 5: Speaker Reference.- 1. Two Unsatisfactory Intention-Based Views.- 2. A Fresh Start.- 3. Objections to the Sufficiency of the Conditions.- 4. Objections to the Necessity of the Conditions.- 5. Utterances Involving More Than One Hearer, and in the Absence of An Audience.- 6: Predication, and What is Said.- 1. Speaker Predication.- 2. A Theory of Speaker Predication.- 3. What Is Said.- 4. An Objection.- 5. Brevity and Sentence Fragments.- 6. Unusual But Important Cases.- 7: Concerning Fiction and Fictions.- 1. What Is To Be Explained.- 2. How Not To Explain It.- 3. A Better Explanation.- 4. Some Complications Concerning Fictions.- 8: Further Implications.- 1. Epistemology and the Philosophy of Language.- 2. Methodological Solipsism.- 3. The Intentional Fallacy, and Deconstruction.- 4. What If This Is All Wrong?.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.