De la sémantique pragmatique au contextualisme

Abstract

Following Gottlob Frege’s seminal work, in particular the famous « context principle » from Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik’s foreword, the notion of « context » gained prominence in the philosophy of language during the second half of the 20th century. This generated however major misunderstandings. This paper seeks to partly clarify those misunderstandings by introducing a distinction between “contextualism” (from a wittgensteinian and austinian point of view) and “pragmatical semantics”. It intends to show that pragmatical semantics, whose analyses focus exclusively on the proposition, while taking into account some extra-semantics pieces of context, maintains the idea that an utterance has a propositional content which can be evaluated as “true” or “false” and that the sense of an utterance is determined by truth conditions (that is the way the world should be for an utterance to be true). In this sense, pragmatical semantics remain a semantical analysis of the sentence. The paper seeks to show that, on the opposite, the right understanding of “radical contextualism” refuses precisely this semantics approach of the utterance and defines the context not as a piece of “content” in a sentence but as the norm which determines a speech act as an act.

Keywords

• semantics
• meaning
• language
• contextualism
• literalism
• composition