Critical Pragmatics

This slim and elegant book by Korta and Perry (KP) is a welcome new contribution to the semantics-pragmatics area, specifically as regards the semantics-pragmatics interface for singular terms. Its main idea is that in order to account for the role of linguistic meaning in communication, we will need reflexive semantic contents beside the ordinary, referential ones. The reflexive contents derive from the reflexive truth-conditions of sentences. To exemplify, Perry's utterance of

is true referentially iff Perry has a broken arm (ignoring time). The sentence has the reflexive truth-conditions that any English utterance u of (1) is true iff the speaker of u has a broken arm (7). This is very close to Davidson's (1984 [1973]) treatment, as well as to Kaplan's (1989) idea of character. The novel part is the idea of the reflexive content of a particular utterance u: for (1),...