Pragmatics and Intensional Logic

Abstract

The word ‘pragmatics’ was used in Morris [1] for that branch of philosophy of language which involves, besides linguistic expressions and the objects to which they refer, also the users of the expressions and the possible contexts of use. The other two branches, syntax and semantics, dealing respectively with expressions alone and expressions together with their reference, had already been extensively developed by the time at which Morris wrote, the former by a number of authors and the latter in Tarski [1].

This paper was delivered before the Southern California Logic Colloquium on January 6, 1967, and reports research partly supported by U.S. National Science Foundation Grant GP-4594. I should like to express gratitude to my student Dr. J. A. W. Kamp for a number of valuable suggestions beyond those explicitly acknowledged below, and to Mr. Tobin Barrozo for correcting an error. It should perhaps be mentioned that this paper was submitted to another journal on November 7, 1967, but was withdrawn after two and one-half years because of the great delay in its publication; it was thus intended to appear before either Montague [3] or Montague [41], for both of which it supplies a certain amount of background.