Meaning, reference, and what words do — theories of meaning, speech acts, the semantics-pragmatics divide, and vagueness.
9 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Science and Linguistics
Benjamin Lee Whorf · 1940
Argues that a language's grammar is not a neutral channel for thought but actively shapes how its speakers analyse and perceive the world, drawing on…
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Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On Sense and Reference
Gottlob Frege · 1892
Two expressions can refer to the same thing while differing in sense — 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' both name Venus but express it…
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac · 1746
Traces how signs, from natural cries to conventional words, are what let a mind hold several ideas at once and reason over them, arguing language…
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12 of 13 works
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Argues that a language's grammar is not a neutral channel for thought but actively shapes how its speakers analyse and perceive the world, drawing on contrasts between Hopi and European tense and number systems.
Notes on this copyStewart Candlish & George Wrisley
Reconstructs Wittgenstein's argument that a language only its inventor could in principle understand is not really a language at all, since correctness for a purely private rule collapses into whatever seems correct to the speaker.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roy Sorensen
Surveys the competing accounts of why predicates like 'bald' or 'tall' have no sharp cutoff, from the view that vagueness is a gap in our knowledge to the view that reality itself has fuzzy boundaries.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDiana Raffman & Dominic Hyde
Sets out the paradox that removing one grain from a heap never turns it into a non-heap, yet enough removals plainly do, and surveys why every proposed solution has to give up something that looks obviously true.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyKepa Korta & John Perry
Maps the disputed border between what a sentence's grammar and lexicon fix as its content and what context and inference add on top, arguing the two cannot be cleanly separated at the point most theories try to draw the line.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyMitchell Green
Surveys the distinction between what an utterance says, does and brings about, and works through how illocutionary force can be communicated indirectly, as a request dressed up as a question about ability.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyGottlob Frege
Two expressions can refer to the same thing while differing in sense — 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' both name Venus but express it differently — which is why identity statements can be informative rather than trivial.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyEtienne Bonnot de Condillac
Traces how signs, from natural cries to conventional words, are what let a mind hold several ideas at once and reason over them, arguing language does not just report thought but is what makes structured thought possible at all.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026P. F. Strawson
Argues against Russell that a sentence like 'the present King of France is bald' is not straightforwardly false but fails to say anything true or false at all, because using a definite description presupposes rather than asserts that something answers to it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyEric H. Lenneberg
Challenges Whorf's linguistic relativity for confusing what a language makes easy to say with what its speakers are actually capable of perceiving or thinking, and calls for the claim to be tested rather than assumed.
Notes on this copyMax Black
Argues a live metaphor is not a decorated comparison that could be paraphrased away without loss, but an interaction between two ideas in which each reorganises how we see the other.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyH. P. Grice
Distinguishes what a sign naturally means from what a speaker means by using it, and analyses speaker-meaning as intending an audience to form a belief by means of recognising that very intention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy