Language vs Languages and Philosophy vs Linguistics

Abstract

If someone requests that I do something and expresses the request in French, I will only be confused and shrug my shoulders: I do not know French. But I still know what a request is, and I would not be confused if the request was expressed in Swedish or in English. Described in such a brief manner, this fact makes it very tempting to say that there must be a general notion of requests that underlies the different ways in which requests can be expressed in different languages. The following investigation will be concerned with this idea, and the nature of the fact that prompts it.