What kind of actions can we perform with our words? What is the relationship between the meaning of an utterance and the context in which the utterance is produced?
This day school attempts to introduce you to one of the dominant contemporary traditions in the Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language. Philosophy of language is mostly concerned with the role that language plays in our thinking. We will explore how language works, to determine when (and how) we speak meaningfully in different contexts. How do we understand each other’s intentions in our communications? How language users interpret words and signs?
We will also examine how people use their cultural background and assumption, even unconsciously, in their interpretation and conversation. To get a grasp on this, we will particularly study the Speech Act theory, Implicatures and the Cooperative Principle, Embodied Cognition, and Conceptual Metaphors. These theories and principles give us different tools to analyse natural language in a consistent way.