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Content, Mood, and Force
Author(s) -
Recanati Francois
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
philosophy compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 25
ISSN - 1747-9991
DOI - 10.1111/phc3.12045
Subject(s) - cornerstone , sentence , content (measure theory) , argument (complex analysis) , linguistics , mood , epistemology , philosophy , psychology , mathematics , social psychology , history , mathematical analysis , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology
In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.