ABSTRACT
The study of ideology and ideological critique has largely been pursued independently of the analytic projects of interest to most contemporary philosophers of language. But, as Swanson points out, many of the classic debates in the philosophy of language may “be intimately intertwined with ideological disputes that are clearly socially, historically, and politically important.” Swanson gives the example of “personalism”—the view that the meanings of utterances are entirely determined by the intentions of their speakers—and shows how such a view may interact in complex ways with the nature of offensive uses of language.
