ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a novel foundational theory of linguistic communication that breaks away from the idealizations that have been critiqued throughout this book. This picture conceives of linguistic communication as a complex social affair characterized by a multiplicity of goals and interests. Though linguistic communication serves many different functions, it is argued that one in particular plays a primary explanatory role: this is the goal of attention-direction. What we do, first and foremost, when we communicate, is to draw one another’s attention to contents. We often have further communicative goals in performing speech acts which can vary according to the context, but what is common to each type of communicative act is the goal of attention-direction. The big picture can be divided into roughly three parts: the theory of meaning, the metasemantic theory, and the pragmatic theory. These parts are interrelated, and each will draw from what are taken to be the most important and compelling insights of Grice, Lewis, and Stalnaker while rejecting their common conception of language as cooperative information exchange.
