Imagination and Convention
Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language
Matthew Stone author Ernie Lepore author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:11th Dec '14
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£32.99(9780198797418)
What do speakers mean? What do they convey? What do they reveal? How do they invite us to think? Communication exploits conventional rules, deliberate choices, and many other faculties. How? A common answer invokes simple meanings and general ways to reinterpret them, as in H. P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Lepore and Stone show such answers are unsatisfactory. Instead, they argue that language provides diverse tools for making ideas public, and that communication recruits distinct kinds of imagination. The work synthesizes results from across cognitive science into a profoundly new account of meaning in language.
Lepore and Stone's articulation of direct intentionalism offers a strategy for combining into a unified theory both fundamental philosophical theories concerning the nature of intentions and cooperative activity and empirical theories in linguistics and cognitive science concerning the particular mechanism of natural languages. This is a significant accomplishment.... I wholeheartedly recommend their book for anyone interested in the relationship between conventional meaning and cooperative rational action and the attendant issue of how to understand the relationship between pragmatics and semantics. * Lenny Clapp, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
ISBN: 9780198717188
Dimensions: 239mm x 163mm x 25mm
Weight: 608g
302 pages