Critical Pragmatics: An Inquiry into Reference and Communication

Kepa Korta · John Perry

07/2011 · Cambridge University Press

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Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.

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Kepa Korta is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. His work has been focused on the study of dialogue, the implicit/explicit distinction, and the semantics/pragmatics interface. His research fields include the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics, and the philosophy of action. He has authored a number of books and papers, and recently co-authored with John Perry several works on pragmatics in Mind and Language, Synthese, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is currently director of the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) of the University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastian.

John Perry is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He is the author of The Problem of the Essential Indexical (1993; 2000), Reference and Reflexivity (2001), Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (2001) and Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (2002), and co-author (with Jon Barwise) of Situations and Attitudes (1983).