Full Description
Now in its Fourth Edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena.
Author William G. Lycan structures the book's 13 chapters into four general parts. Part I, Reference and Referring, includes topics such as Russell's Theory of Descriptions (and its failings), Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the Description Theory of proper names, Searle's Cluster Theory, and the Causal-Historical Theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes an introduction to the Relevance approach to pragmatics. Part IV, The Expressive and the Figurative, examines various forms of expressive language, as well as what "metaphorical meaning" is and how most listeners readily grasp it.
Features of Philosophy of Language include:
chapter overviews and summaries
clear supportive examples
study questions
annotated lists of further reading
a glossary.
Key Updates to the Fourth Edition:
a new section on the Predicativist theory of proper names
an expanded section on Inferentialist theories of meaning
a new section on Dynamic ("update") theories of meaning
a separate section on varieties of presupposition
an all-new section on "applied" philosophy of language, listing eleven recent areas of research
up-to-date coverage of new literature, further reading lists, and the bibliography.
Contents
Introduction: meaning and reference
PART I: Reference and referring
2 Definite descriptions
3 Proper names: the Description Theory
4 Proper names: Direct Reference and the Causal-Historical Theory
PART II: Theories of meaning
5 "Use" theories
6 Psychological theories: Grice's program
7 Verificationism
8 Truth-Condition theories
PART III Pragmatics and speech acts
9 Semantic pragmatics
10 Speech acts and illocutionary force
11 Implicative relations
PART IV: The expressive and the figurative
12 Expressive language
13 Metaphor
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
