Analytical Philosophy
Gholamreza Hosseinpour
Abstract
One of the important questions about definite descriptions is the difference between referential and attributive uses of these descriptions. Donnellan objects Russell and Strawson's theories of definite descriptions because they both fail to explain referential use, but nowhere do they give us a set ...
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One of the important questions about definite descriptions is the difference between referential and attributive uses of these descriptions. Donnellan objects Russell and Strawson's theories of definite descriptions because they both fail to explain referential use, but nowhere do they give us a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing any use. Kripke also believes that the difference between referential and attributive uses is in fact the difference between the speaker's reference and the semantic reference. The speaker's reference and the semantic reference coincide in attributive use, but in referential use, they may be different. According to the theory of speech acts, Kripke's account may not be quite correct, however, the difference between speaker's reference and semantic reference is similar to the difference between the speaker's meaning and the meaning of the sentence, although Kripke adopts a strange way of expressing it, because reference, contrary to meaning, is a speech act. But Searle's solution is based on his theory of indirect speech acts; That is, the speaker says something, he means what he says, but he also means something else. In Searle's account, the speaker's primary illocutionary act which is not literally expressed in his utterances, is done indirectly by performing his secondary illocutionary act which is expressed literally. According to Searle, all Donnellan's referential uses are mere uses where the speaker uses a definite description that expresses the secondary aspect under which the reference is made.
Gholamreza Hosseinpour
Abstract
In his article "Truth", Peter Strawson, following Ramsey, raises the issue of the redundancy of the theory of truth. He considers the utterance of sentences containing the truth predicate to do something, and in his idiomatic sense, he does not consider it constative, but performative. Performative utterances ...
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In his article "Truth", Peter Strawson, following Ramsey, raises the issue of the redundancy of the theory of truth. He considers the utterance of sentences containing the truth predicate to do something, and in his idiomatic sense, he does not consider it constative, but performative. Performative utterances are not true or false, but are characterized by felicitous or infelicitous, and are actions or deeds, not propositions or descriptions. Thus, in this article, after mentioning Strawson's critiques of the theory of truth and explaining his performative theory of truth and explaining Austin's performative utterances, we will deal with the three critiques of Strawson's conception and then examining the relationship between linguistic meaning and the performative theory of truth and explaining systematical of meaning, we prove that not just Strawson's performative theory of truth is incorrect, but that the conception of performative uses of language can also be defective. In this sense, the ordinary language philosophers also exaggerated the extent to which performative sentences are different from ordinary non-performative sentences. These philosophers mistakenly assumed that performative sentences do not represent descriptive and ordinary propositions that provide the sentences with straightforward truth conditions.
