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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
On What We Mean

On What We Mean

Chien, Arnold J.

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral Reference

ISBN10: 0761824170
ISBN13: 9780761824176
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: Nov 8 2002
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.77
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In On What We Mean, Arnold Chien discusses the meaning of a speaker, a notion we use in everyday conversation. Speaker's meaning is a fundamental notion of pragmatics, i.e. the study of the relation between words and speakers. Yet everyday speaker's meaning has not been systematically studied in philosophy or linguistics. Chien's approach to these issues is to take a speaker's meaning as an answer to what do you (s/he) mean (WDYM) questions. He then analyzes WDYM-questions in terms of Bas van Fraassen's analysis of why-questions, according to which, a question consists of a set of parameters whose values vary according to the context. The constraints on speaker's meanings are analyzed in terms of certain constraints on answers to WDYM-questions. The account is extended to metaphor, understood to be a kind of conceptual indeterminacy.

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