Abstract
In the last three decades Searle developed an important philosophical work on Language, Mind and Social Reality which has exerted a considerable influence on human and cognitive sciences as well as on philosophy. Searle is now in the midst of theoretical debates on central issues such as the use and comprehension of language, the expression and communication of thoughts, meaning, sense, reference, truth, satisfaction and success, speech acts, conversation, the nature of mind and its place in nature, the structure of consciousness and intentionality, attitudes, perception and action, rationality and the nature of social reality and institutions. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Notes
I wish to thank Scott R. Paine for helpful remarks on the style and content of this paper.
Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Grice, P. Study in the Ways of Words. Harvard University Press, 1989.
For the principles of a formal pragmatics of non literal utterances, see Vanderveken, D. “Conversational Maxims and Non Literal speech Acts.” In: E. Lepore, and E. Van Gulick (eds.). John Searle and His Critics. Blackwell, 1991 and “Formal Pragmatics of Non Literal Meaning.” Linguistische Berichte 51 (1997).
Some (but few) attempts of performing illocutionary acts are made by thought alone without any public use of language. We can mentally make assertions, promises and recommendations to ourselves without making any oral or written utterance. Such inner acts of thought have the logical form of illocutionary acts. But given the principle of expressibility of thought we could not entertain them privately if we could not also, at least in principle, express them linguistically by a public utterance.
See my paper “Strong and Weak Illocutionary Commitment to Elementary and Complex Illocutionary Acts.” Forthcoming in: Université du Québec à Montréal: Cahiers d’Épistémologie.
See my papers “Non literal Speech Acts and Conversational Maxims” and “Formal Pragmatics of Non Literal Meaning”.
See N. Cocchiarella’s considerations on my formal semantics in the chapter “Formally Oriented Philosophy of Language.” In: J. Canfield (ed). Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the 20 th Century, Volume 10 of the Routledge History of Philosophy, Routledge, 1997.
Candida Jaci de Sousa Melo. “Possible Directions of Fit between Mind, Language and the World.” In: D. Vanderveken, and S. Kubo (eds.). Essays in speech Act Theory. Benjamins, 2000.
See my work The Basic Logic of Action. Université du Québec à Montréal: Cahier d’Épistémologie 9907 (1999).
See Belnap, N., and M. Perloff. “The Way of the Agent.” Studio Logica 51 (1992).
The notion of intention in action is explained in Intentionality.
A proposition P strongly implies another Q in my theory of truth whenever firstly, that proposition P has all the atomic propositions of Q and secondly, all possible truth conditions of atomic propositions which are compatible with its truth in any circumstance are also compatible with the truth of Q in that circumstance. For more information on the predicative propostional logic of illocutionary logic, see my paper “Success, Satisfaction and Truth in the Logic of Speech Acts and Formal Semantics.” Université du Québec à Montréal: Cahier d’Épistémologie 9909 (1999). Forthcoming in: S. Davis, and B. Gillan (eds). A Reader in Semantics. Oxford University Press.
See Searle, J. “Conversation.” In: Searle et al (eds). (On) Searle on Conversation. John Benjamins, 1992.
See Vanderveken, D. “La logique illocutoire et l’analyse du discours.” In: D. Luzzati et al (eds.). Le dialogique. Peter Lang, 1997, “La structure logique des dialogues intelligents.” In: B. Moulin et al (eds.). Analyse et simulation de conversations. L’Interdiscilplinaire, 1999, and “Illocutionary Logic and Discourse Typology.” In: Université du Québec à Montréal: Cahier d’Épistémologie 9912 (1999). Forthcoming in the next issue on Searle of the Revue internationale de philosophie.
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Vanderveken, D. (2002). Searle on Meaning and Action1 . In: Grewendorf, G., Meggle, G. (eds) Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_10
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