ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes mood from force, and then describes with Austin the three components of speech-acts: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary acts. Then we consider Grice. A statement in which P implicates Q is: P does not logically entail Q, but a well-informed, competent speaker would take the speaker to be intending to convey that Q. With his ‘cooperative principle’ this enables Grice to describe his ‘conversational implicature’. Strawson introduces the concept of presupposition: if P presupposes Q, then if Q is false then P is neither true nor false. This facilitates Strawson’s attack on Russell’s theory of definite descriptions: if there is no unique F, rather than saying that ‘The F is G’ is false, we can say that ‘The F is G’ presupposes reference on the part of the speaker’s use of ‘The F’. Donnellan points out that ‘The F is G’ can serve to communicate a true statement, even when it is false taken in Russell’s sense. Kripke in effect saves Russell, suggesting that speaker’s meaning can differ from semantic meaning. There are many theories of metaphor, but it is plausible to regard it as strictly a pragmatic phenomenon.
