“MEANING AS USE”, NORMATIVE SENTENCES, AND ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE

This short remark, which is a minor objection to Vsevolod A. Ladov’s panel article “Gottlob Frege’s Semantics in Modern Analytic Philosophy”, examines one of the critical arguments put forward by Jerrold Katz against Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “meaning as use”. I am talking about the argument that fixing deeper meanings of grammatical forms that are not relativized in language games allows us to show that the meanings of grammatical forms are not caused in a specific language game. I show that, if only a certain action can be treated as a criterion for understanding meaning in the framework of communication, then the crucial importance is not so much the propositional content of this action as its illocutionary force. Without the illocutionary force, the meaning of linguistic form is quite difficult to understand, if at all possible. The reference to normative sentences expressed by special prescriptive speech acts made it possible to show that the differences between orders, requests, predictions manifest themselves only at the pragmatic level of language use, there is no such difference at the semantic level. Beyond the context of a particular language game, such a distinction cannot be made.

meaning, speech act, normative sentence, illocutionary force