Overview

Uncovering an aspect of Gottlob Frege’s linguistic theorizing that has until now received little attention, this volume offers the first detailed exposition of Frege’s pragmatics. Thorsten Sander explores his views on colouring, side-thoughts, presuppositions, indexicals and illocutionary force and closely relates these to current research in philosophy of language and linguistics. Throughout his career, Frege was concerned with various secondary aspects of meaning. He claims, for instance, that the two words ‘dog’ and ‘cur’ differ not in what he calls sense, but merely in colouring. By contrast, the difference between ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’ is supposed to be a matter of sense. How exactly does sense differ from colouring? Frege also claims that by using a proper name one presupposes the existence of its bearer and that our utterances are frequently associated with side-thoughts. What exactly does he mean by these terms, and wherein lies the difference between these phenomena? Frege's Pragmatics answers questions such as these, providing a fresh perspective on Frege’s account of various pragmatic aspects of language. In this first book-length treatment, Sander makes the case that Frege’s groundbreaking ideas are an essential part of his overall philosophical enterprise.

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9781350463257

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Reviews

‘At long last we have a comprehensive treatment of Frege's contribution to natural language pragmatics, which has often been overlooked or underestimated. Despite Frege's remarks on the imprecisions of language, he was a pioneer in the field, partly in virtue of his foundational work on the semantic properties of logical languages. Sander's book is an important corrective which shows that Frege can still be mined for insights into speech acts, presupposition, colouring, illocutionary force, indirect meaning, indexicals, and much more.’ -- Elmar Unnsteinsson * Lecturer and Assistant Professor, University College Dublin, Ireland * ‘The father of modern formal philosophy, Gottlob Frege also made essential contributions to the study of natural language meaning, extending to a range of expressions and constructions that contribute to encoded meaning but “make no difference to the thought”. While many critics follow Dummett in dismissing Fregean “colouring” or “tone” (for phenomena to which Frege himself applied a number of different labels) as fatally subjective, Thorsten Sander persuasively demonstrates that these scholars have been tone-deaf. Sander shows that the classifications devised to capture the insights of Frege, Grice, and other pioneers in the analysis of meaning systematically fail to carve linguistic reality at the joints—to the extent that such joints exist. Sander has done more than any other scholar to explain the thorny but centrally important notion of colouring and its connections to other central notions in the theory of meaning, from conventional implicature, pragmatic presupposition, and secondary assertion to use-conditional meaning and expressivity. Linguists and philosophers of language of the present and future will long be indebted to Thorsten Sander’s superb colouring book.’ -- Laurence R. Horn * Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Philosophy, Yale University, USA *

Author Information

Thorsten Sander is Research Fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

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