Thorsten Sander

The aim of this article is to offer a solution to an exegetical puzzle which Weiner (2020) has recently put as follows: “Why does Frege analyze (some) imperfect parts of natural language?” According to what Weiner calls the “Standard Interpretation”, Frege analysed logical imperfections because he “wanted to give a general account of the workings of language” (Dummett 1981). Weiner (2020), in contrast, claims that Frege was solely concerned with the fragment of natural language “in which we express apparently evaluable inferences”. I argue that neither of these interpretations offers an accurate picture of the historical Frege. On my view, Frege is (primarily) interested in those linguistic phenomena that are (in some sense or other) relevant to his logical concerns, and I buttress this interpretation by a detailed analysis of Frege’s views on existential import, existential presuppositions and colouring.

Quite a few languages make a distinction between formal (“V”) pronouns, such as German “Sie” or Mandarin nin3, and informal (“T”) ones, such as “du” and ni2. Pace Levinson and Horn, I argue that the rule-conforming usage of T and V cannot be construed as an example of conventional implicature. The difference is, rather, a matter of use-conditional content. However, speakers may also use T/V pronouns in situations where the propriety standards are less clear. In such cases, speakers may employ T or V in order to convey which pronoun ought to be used, which may be construed as a specific kind of manner implicature. Finally, speakers may intentionally use inappropriate pronouns. In certain contexts, this may constitute a manner implicature too. In some other contexts, this may be likened to intentionally infringing on a rule of etiquette. Doing so will often be considered rude, but that does not necessarily mean that the infringement constitutes a communicative act.

This chapter offers an overview of the philosophical discussion on expressivity roughly since the time of Frege. It reviews some of the major steps towards a better understanding of expressive content and also highlights some perennial problems. Among the questions addressed in this chapter are the following: how does expressive content differ from at-issue content? How do expressives affect an interlocutor and how does this relate to their meaning? What is the relation between expressives and their descriptive counterparts? How can we tell apart emotive meaning and emotive psychological effects? Are there expressive speech acts proper? What kind of content is expressive content (is it illocutionary, use-conditional, or a conventional implicature)? Finally, can there be such a thing as a logic of expressives? Sections: 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Frege's asymmetricalism: Two kinds of content 3.3 Marty's asymmetricalism: Two kinds of mental states 3.4 Emotive meaning 3.5 Illocutionary expressivity 3.6 Can there be a logic of expressives? 3.7 Conclusion

Quite a few scholars have argued that certain subsentential items contribute illocutionary contents. For instance, according to Camp (2013, 2018) using a slur amounts to performing two speech acts at once. Such claims raise the question of how to test for the illocutionariness of an item. I criticize a recent proposal and put forward a new one, which is based on Austin’s idea that illocutionary verbs can be identified by means of his “To say x was to do y” diagnostic. The test I propose can be successfully applied to Camp’s dual act analysis, but one may still wonder whether a speech act theoretic account is ultimately preferable to what Camp calls a “two-factor view”. I conclude by discussing whether the dual act view is indeed better poised to explain the highly variable projection behaviour of slurs.

The starting point for this article is Holton’s (2017) claim that there are no anti-factive attitude verbs (in Indo-European languages). In a first step, I argue that the German verb “wähnen” (as used by Frege and his contemporaries) is a counter-example. However, it seems as though anti-factives are rarer than factives, which raises the question of how to account for that observation. Since Holton’s explanation, as well as a seemingly promising neo-Gricean explanation, turns out to be unsuccessful, I turn to the question of whether the rarity of anti-factives needs to be explained in the first place. I argue that, on closer inspection, anti-factives are not as special as they may appear, and I also argue that the comparative rarity of anti-factives can be explained via the principle of charity.

Frege’s Begriffsschrift account of modality involves both a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that modal notions are logically insignificant; the positive claim is that modals convey a ‘hint’ (Wink) as to the speaker’s grounds for judgement. This paper is about Frege’s positive claim, which has not received much attention. I explain in detail the Fregean notion of hinting and how to distinguish hints from conceptual contents, and I argue that Frege’s two-dimensional account of modal talk is supported by various observations. However, it also seems clear that Frege’s account cannot be the whole story.

Uncovering an aspect of Gottlob Frege's linguistic theorizing that has until now received little attention, this volume offers the first detailed exposition of Frege's pragmatics. Thorsten Sander explores his views on colouring, side-thoughts, presuppositions, indexicals and illocutionary force and closely relates these to current research in philosophy of language and linguistics. Throughout his career, Frege was concerned with various secondary aspects of meaning. He claims, for instance, that the two words 'dog' and 'cur' differ not in what he calls sense, but merely in colouring. By contrast, the difference between 'morning star' and 'evening star' is supposed to be a matter of sense. How exactly does sense differ from colouring? Frege also claims that by using a proper name one presupposes the existence of its bearer and that our utterances are frequently associated with side-thoughts. What exactly does he mean by these terms, and wherein lies the difference between these phenomena. Frege's Pragmatics answers questions such as these, providing a fresh perspective on Frege's account of various pragmatic aspects of language. In this first book-length treatment, Sander makes the case that Frege's groundbreaking ideas are an essential part of his overall philosophical enterprise.

I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that ought to be distinguished: truth-conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at-issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non-at-issue (in the case of epithets).

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents speakers intend to convey.

Quite a few scholars claim that many implicata are propositions about the speaker's epistemic or doxastic states. I argue, on the contrary, that implicata are generally non-epistemic. Some alleged cases of epistemic implicature are not implicatures in the first place because they do not meet Grice's non-triviality requirement, and epistemic implicata in general would infringe on the maxim of quantity. Epistemic implicatures ought to be construed as members of a larger family of implicature-like phenomena.

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to names.

Dem "Manifestationsargument" zufolge steht eine realistische Semantik der Wahrheitsbedingungen im Widerspruch zu dem Gedanken, dass das Verstehen von Sätzen eine Fähigkeit ist, die sich im Handeln manifestieren können muss. – Der Aufsatz zeigt, dass sowohl Realisten als auch Anti-Realisten die These aufzugeben haben, dass das Verstehen eines Satzes im Erfassen der jeweiligen Wahrheitsbedingungenbesteht. Die realistische Annahme der Existenz verifikationstranszendenter Wahrheiten steht – unabhängig vom Manifestationsprinzip – im Widerspruch zu einer wahrheitskonditionalen Semantik. Die von heutigen Anti-Realisten vertretenen Theorien des Verstehens sind allerdings einem ähnlichen Einwand ausgesetzt, insofern sie gleichfalls nicht unsere Fähigkeit, unentscheidbare Sätze zu verstehen, erklären können.

Die Idee, daß die Bedeutung sprachlicher Ausdrücke im Rückgriff auf ihren Gebrauch in der Sprache zu klären ist, ist seit Wittgenstein gängig. Das Buch verteidigt diesen Grundgedanken durch die Ausarbeitung einer prozeduralistischen Bedeutungstheorie, die zwei theoretische Strömungen zusammenführt: eine inferentialistische Semantik und eine konventionalistische Sprechakttheorie. Das Buch bietet darüber hinaus eine gründliche Diskussion realistischer und bescheidener Bedeutungstheorien sowie alternativer gebrauchstheoretischer Ansätze.

In der neueren Sprachphilosophie ist wiederholt der soziale Charakter des Redens betont worden. Das Buch versucht, diese These auf der Grundlage einer genauen Untersuchung der Abfolge einzelner sprachlicher Handlungen zu verteidigen. Die orthodoxe Sprechakttheorie hat sich bislang weitgehend auf die Gelingensbedingungen einzelner sprachlicher Vollzüge konzentriert. Isolierte Redehandlungen stellen allerdings in der kommunikativen Praxis einen Ausnahmefall dar: Ein kompetenter Sprecher muss nicht nur die vom sprachlichen Kontext unabhängigen Korrektheitsstandards kennen; vielmehr muss er auch in der Lage sein, die eigenen Sprechakte im Rahmen eines Textes kohärent miteinander zu verknüpfen und auf Redehandlungen anderer so zu reagieren, dass ein genuiner Diskurs zwischen den Parteien entsteht – im Gegensatz zu einer bloßen Aneinanderreihung “für sich” korrekter Äußerungen. Das Buch verfolgt das Ziel, das für die Struktur derartiger Rede(handlungs)sequenzen einschlägige Reglement in seinen wesentlichen Aspekten zu rekonstruieren und insbesondere die für ein solches Projekt relevanten sprachphilosophischen Grundfragen zu klären.

Es gehört zu den sprachphilosophischen Gemeinplätzen, daß ein elementarer Satz aus zwei Teilausdrücken besteht – einem Nominator, mit dem wir einen Gegenstand der Rede spezifizieren, und einem Prädikator, mit dem wir dem so herausgegriffenen Gegenstand eine Eigenschaft zuschreiben können. Während der semantische Referentialist Nominatoren typischerweise als solche Ausdrücke definiert, die eine explizite Bezugnahme auf genau einen Gegenstand ermöglichen, wird der Vertreter einer pragmatischen Bedeutungstheorie umgekehrt versuchen, die ontologische Kategorie des Gegenstandes im Rückgriff auf den Begriff des singulären Terminus einzuführen. Hierzu ist es zur Vermeidung eines Zirkels nötig, Nominatoren in einer rein lingualen Weise zu charakterisieren. Der Aufsatz setzt sich mit R. Brandoms Vorschlag auseinander, dem zufolge singuläre Termini solche substituierbaren Ausdrücke sind, die nur in symmetrischen Ersetzungsrelationen stehen. Es wird – vor allem anhand von "indefinite descriptions" – gezeigt, daß eine derartige inferentielle Symmetrie weder eine notwendige noch eine hinreichende Bedingung darstellt

Die Arbeit ist ein Versuch, die Paradoxie der Wißbarkeit aufzulösen, indem gezeigt wird, daß zumindest Anti-Realisten, die zum logischen Revisionismus tendieren, die scheinbar absurde Konklusion ... akzeptieren sollten. Dazu wird zunächst in Abschnitt 1 gezeigt, daß die prima facie unproblematische These ... insofern sonderbar ist, als alle möglichen Instanzen normale oder performative Widersprüche darstellen. Auf dieser Grundlage wird in Abschnitt 3 ein retorsives Argument für das Prinzip ... entwickelt. Um den Einwand zu entkräften, daß im Zweifelsfall nicht die These ... aufzugeben ist, sondern die Prinzipien zu verwerfen sind, auf denen das retorsive Argument basiert, wird in Abschnitt 4 auf die unterschiedlichen Optionen, die in der Argumentation auftretenden Formeln zu interpretieren, eingegangen: Wenn logische Operatoren gemäß der „BHK-Interpretation“ gedeutet werden, erweist sich selbst die These ... als auch für den Realisten akzeptable begriffliche Wahrheit. In Abschnitt 5 wird schließlich diskutiert, in welcher Weise ein Intuitionist Thesen formalisieren kann, die eine bestimmte Art von epistemischer Bescheidenheit artikulieren