ABSTRACT
Semantics concerns the former, and pragmatics is largely concerned with the latter. Pragmatics is concerned in the first instance with illocutionary acts. Illocutionary force is largely conventional. The classical theorist of meaning regards pragmatics – the use of language – as built upon a foundation in semantics, where semantics fundamentally involves reference: singular terms paradigmatically refer to objects; predicates refer to properties and relations. An alternative championed by Willard Sellars and articulated by Robert Brandom, regards pragmatics, and in particular inference, as fundamental. There is very little agreement in philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism or psychology on what metaphors are. Philosophers often talk as if the stating of facts or the conveying of factual information were the sole purpose of language. Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, John Austin, Norman Malcolm, O. K. Bouwsma and many others applied the subtleties of careful observation of ordinary language to philosophical problems with sometimes striking results.
