Ingvar Johansson wrote: (01)
>> If I understood him well, Ingvar's distinction (whether it was his
>> original one or not) between sentence meaning and used sentence meaning
>> may be the right thing to mention here. Following that distinction
>> (Ingvar, please correct me if I go wrong),
>
> Yes, you are going wrong. To me, you are using the term 'sentence' in
> such a sense that it can designate only purely oral or graphical
> entities, (02)
The constraint to oral or graphical entities is not necessary. Gestures
etc. can well be parts of an expression. A sentence is whatever you
wish to see as a complete form of expression, but it gains meaning only
when it is interpreted. In this sense, a sentence is not more than
data, which is turned into information when the sentence is interpreted
(according to the rules of the (assumed) language and the situation it
is expressed in). (03)
You may not like this view, of course. (04)
> which then in different contexts get different meanings. (05)
Yes, this is what I meant. (06)
> This
> is not what I meant by 'sentence meaning'. I took the context of an
> English language community for given (in the sense Pat has done in
> another answer to you). (07)
So sentence meaning is that meaning which is the default when no
contextual information is available? That is, "Pat is sleeping" means
(simply) that an individual named 'Pat' is sleeping (how about the time?); (08)
> What happens in the move from 'sentence meaning'
> to 'used sentence meaning' (in the cases under discussion) is that an
> *assertive force* is added to a merely entertained semantic content; (09)
and when one knows that the sentence is spoken out by that Pat's wife
and that she worries about one being too loud so as to wake him up, "Pat
is sleeping" has the used meaning of "Do not make noises" or the like. (010)
But the difference between these cases does not seem to me substantial;
it is rather in how much the assumed context is seen as normal, close
to the default. In the first case above, no context is explicit, and so
the base assumption is that "Pat is sleeping" should be interpreted in
the way most of English speakers would interpret it with no additional
information given. (011)
> think of Frege's assertion sign if you are not familiar with speech act
> theory. (012)
I'll try to think, but it may be difficult. (013)
vQ (014)
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