‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the space of reasons (2009)

Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This turn was marked by two assumptions: that it was primarily the semantics of language that was relevant to broader philosophical issues, and that declarative assertions were the only verbal acts of serious philosophical interest.

In ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’, Rebecca Kukla and I reject these assumptions. Looking at philosophical problems starting with the pragmatics of language, we develop a typology of pragmatic categories of speech within which declaratives have no uniquely privileged position. We demonstrate that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives.

The Grammar of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic Discourse

What is the function of concepts pertaining to meaning in socio-linguistic practice? In this study, we authors argue that we can approach a satisfactory answer by displacing the standard picture of meaning talk as a sort of description with a picture that takes seriously the similarity between meaning talk and various types of normative injunction. In our analysis, we investigate the more general question of the nature of the normative, as well as a range of important topics specific to the philosophy of language.