PHILOS 133 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: San Jose Giants, Partial Function, Pragmatics
Document Summary
Pragmatics is the study of the use of a language, how we do things with words. How we use language to accomplish our goals: original definition was in terms of tokens and types. Semantics takes a sentence type and says what the things that the term stands for, how it has to be related to be true. Obama admires mrs. obama : one word type (obama, two word tokens (obama and [mrs. ] obama) If semantics were really concerned with just types all tokens of the same type would have the same truth-value. 8. semantics, their syntax, but also other features like volume. If you have in mind pragmatics, properties of utterances seem like a natural starting point: natural meaning: x meant that p entails p, non-natural meaning: (whole system of) conventions are pretty arbitrary. X means that p does not entail p (people can lie, be wrong, doesn"t change what they meant: without natural meaning, intelligence may not have evolved.
