Occasion-Sensitivity - Charles Travis

This is a book of essays in philosophy of language dating from 1984 to 2006. They treat some familiar philosophical issues, and painstakingly develop objections to fundamental assumptions of traditional logically orientated analytical philosophy (LOAP). I have space for two examples, Travis' approach to a kind of sceptical argument widely discussed around the middle of the twentieth century, and his objections to LOAP approaches to natural‐language semantics. These objections bear on assumptions which are central to several of his other targets, including Grice's distinction between standard meaning and implicature, bivalence according to which natural‐language declarative sentences must be either true or false, some Quinean ideas about the opacity of belief ascriptions, and the Fregean account of belief as a state which relates the believer to the sense of a sentence. I found Travis' sensible ideas about language more compelling than the methods he uses to develop them and some of the concerns that drive his work. The latter derive from ‘ordinary‐language philosophy’, LOAP's main analytical‐philosophical competitor. Like John Austin, Travis grounds philosophical claims on intuitions about what competent native speakers of English would or should say in hypothetical situations of his own devising

Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Grice · Implicature · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Metaphysics · Ordinary language philosophy · Philosophy of language · Pragmatics · Sentence · Skepticism · Western philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science