André Leclerc

Je présente d’abord quelques notions de base de la sémantique philosophique, en particulier celles de signification linguistique, compré-hension linguistique, conditions de vérité, et “ce qui est dit”. La signi-fication linguistique ne doit pas être confondue avec “ce qui est dit” par l’énonciation littérale d’une phrase en contexte, cette dernière notion, centrale dans le contextualisme actuel, pouvant être reconstruite comme sémantique ou pragmatique selon le rôle que l’on fait jouer à la notion de signification du locuteur. J’examine ensuite de quelle façon ces notions se combinent dans diverses approches ou “figures historiques”, en insistant sur la relation langage-pensée. La première est la théorie idéationnelle du langage, défendue par Arnauld et Locke. La seconde est la sémantique philosophique classique, qui se développe dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. La troisième est le contextualisme actuel, développé en parti-culier par Travis et Récanati. La comparaison révèle ceci: quant à la façon dont est reconstruite la notion de “ce qui est dit”: l’idéisme et le contex-tualisme s’accordent pour en faire une notion pragmatique, en opposition à la sémantique philosophique classique assortie de l’appareil gricéen.I first present a few basic notions of philosophical semantics, namely that of linguistic meaning, linguistic understanding, truth-con-ditions, and What Is Said. I try to show, like contextualists today urge us to, that the distinction between linguistic meaning and What Is Said by a literal utterance of a sentence in a context should not be blurred. The notion of What Is Said, of central importance for contextualism, can be construed as a semantic or a pragmatic notion according to the role played by the notion of speaker meaning in one’s favorite theory. Then I present an overview of three historical approaches in the history of the sciences of language, focusing on the language-thought relation and showing how these notions combine differently. The first is the ideational theory of language, defended by Arnauld and Locke. The sec-ond is the classical philosophical semantics developed in the first half of XXth century. The third is today’s contextualism, developed mainly by Travis and Recanati. Here is what the comparison reveals: the “way of ideas” and contextualism agree that the notion of What Is Said should be construed as a pragmatic notion, in opposition to classical philosophical semantics cum the Gricean apparatus

Thomas Reid introduced the notion of social operation of mind in the theory of mind and language. Hhis friend James Gregory developed this notion and gave it a meaningful role in classical Uuniversal Grammar, especially in the General Theory of the Mmoods of Vverbs. Bbefore Reid and Gregory, the classical Philosophical Grammar presupposes, inter alia, that the mind is self-contained; in other words, that mental contents and operations are all independent from the natural and social environment. Ssome of these operations have a modus/dictum structure corresponding, grosso modo, to the actual distinction between psychological mode and conceptual mental content, also analogous to the distinction between illocutionary force and propositional content, which is partially reflected in the system of verbal moods of natural languages. The famous Grammaire de Port-Royal already pointed to a serious limitation of this model. Arnauld & Lancelot wrote: “Oon ne se commande pas proprement à soi-même” (“Oone does not command properly to oneself”). I will try to show that Reid realized clearly that what we call today “individualism” does not allow us to characterize adequately the social aspects of language, and consequently headed for a different conception of the mind, an anti-individualist one. The notion of social operation of the mind is the cornerstone of that reform undertaken by Reid in the philosophy of mind. Furthermore, he and Gregory defended that natural languages were created especially to expresses those social aspects of language and mind