'Yo!' and 'Lo!' : the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons / Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kukla, Rebecca, 1969- author.

Lance, Mark Norris, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Speech acts (Linguistics).

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

Pragmatics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (254 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2009]

Summary:

Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This turn was marked by two assumptions: that it was primarily the semantics of language that was relevant to broader philosophical issues, and that declarative assertions were the only verbal acts of serious philosophical interest. In ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance reject these assumptions. Looking at philosophical problems starting with the pragmatics of language, they develop a typology of pragmatic categories of speech within which declaratives have no uniquely privileged position. They demonstrate that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives. Entering into conversation with the work of Anglo-American philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, and Continental philosophers including Heidegger and Althusser, ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ offers solutions (or dissolutions) to long-standing philosophical problems, such as how perception can be both inferentially fecund and responsive to an empirical world, and how moral judgment can be both objective and inherently motivating.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse: Mapping the Terrain

2 Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

3 The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity

4 Anticlimactic Interlude: Why Performatives Are Not That Important to Us

5 Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims

6 Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics of Recognition

7 The Essential Second Person

8 Sharing a World

Appendix: Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Normative Statuses

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674274396

0674274393

OCLC:

1282597798