Varieties of Tone

Abstract

In Part I I argued that although a charge of incoherence does not stick, the sentence-radical approach to analyzing meaning is nevertheless defective. It proves to be incapable of handling too great a number of ordinary expressions. These are not in any way eccentric, and so explanations of their meanings should not be ad hoc. On the contrary, all of those troublesome expressions ought to be capable of being assimilated under a single overarching pattern. This gives rise to the suggestion, not that the sense and force of sentences are therefore in every instance indistinguishable, but that, rather, the explication of sentence-meaning and word-meaning not be reduced to concepts of truth, or truth-conditions, with considerations of non-truth-functional aspects of use tacked on in an unsystematic, noncohesive fashion.