Abstract

Two rather distinct and competing trends can be discerned in twentieth-century philosophy of language: the logical trend, found in the work of Frege, Russell and Tarski, with its focus on language-world connections and truth; the language-use trend, found in the work of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, with its focus on language as employed by speakers in ordinary conversational contexts. Vanderveken's aim here is to bring together both the logistic and language-use traditions by folding the analysis of language-world relations and the formal semantics of truth into the theory of speech acts. This gives rise to a "general semantics" of language-use and language-understanding. Vanderveken claims that such a general semantics of speech acts will provide a transcendental analysis of the a priori forms of possible thought and experience of human speakers. It would therefore be a great mistake to treat this book as just another contribution to the now slightly dated "speech act industry." It is, in effect, an attempt to raise speech act theory to the level of philosophical grammar, or what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers would have called grammaire générale et raisonné.