| Abstract [eng] |
The Problem of the Boundary between Semantics and Pragmatics in Philosophy of Language The author analyses the problem of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. This problem is highly important for the theoretical question what form a theory of semantics of a natural language should take. The author argues that they should be distinguished by the main field of inquiry. Semantics explores a sphere of language as a system, when pragmatics explores a language as behaviour of the language's users and explores the influence of non-linguistic contexts on utterances. From analysis of the philosophy of Donald Davidson the author concludes that Davidson's Truth conditional semantics cannot dissociate from the pragmatics either. Because Davidson views truth as a relation between a sentence, a person, and a time, he should analyse situations when persons are using words describing intentional states such as "I believe", "I love" etc. e. g. explore the sphere of pragmatics. Truth conditions of sentences describing intentional states are not obvious by themselves. The author analyses texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Grice, John Searle, John L. Austin and others philosophers of language whose works concern pragmatical aspects of language. He concludes that Wittgenstein's language-games and Austin's speech acts are the most congenial terms to characterize the pragmatics. The author postulates that the pragmatics cannot dissociate from semantics as far as it tries to explain possibility of intersubjectivity and to characterize what is the meaning of a expression. The author traits Willard V. O. Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis as an argument to prove why it is impossible to explain communication without semantical dimension of explanation. The author thinks that the theory of semantic of Jerrold Katz and some insights of Hilary Putnam could be as a start to create the theory of semantics. The main principle of such a theory would be to explore the literal meaning which is the domain of semantics. Keywords: intention, language-games, pragmatics, Quine's indeterminacy thesis, theory of meaning, truth conditional semantics, semantics, verificationism,. |
