Where Questions Of Style And Exposition Are

Well, What Does "good" Mean Anyway? As Wittgenstein Suggested, "good," Like "game," Has A Family Of Meanings. Prominent Among Them Is This One: "meets The Criteria Or Standards Of Assessment Or Evaluation."

It Seemed To A Number Of Philosophers Of Language, Myself Included, That We Should Attempt To Achieve A Unification Of Chomsky's Syntax, With The Results Of The Researches That Were Going On In Semantics And Pragmatics. I Believe That This Effort Has Proven To Be A Failure. Though Chomsky Did Indeed Revolutionize The Subject Of Linguistics, It Is Not At All Clear, At The End The Century, What The Solid Results Of This Revolution Are. As Far As I Can Tell There Is Not A Single Rule Of Syntax That All, Or Even Most, Competent Linguists Are Prepared To Agree Is A Rule.

The Reason That No Computer Program Can Ever Be A Mind Is Simply That A Computer Program Is Only Syntactical, And Minds Are More Than Syntactical. Minds Are Semantical, In The Sense That They Have More Than A Formal Structure, They Have A Content.

The Assertion Fallacy Is The Fallacy Of Confusing The Conditions For The Performance Of The Speech Act Of Assertion With The Analysis Of The Meaning Of Particular Words Occurring In Certain Assertions.

The Problem Posed By Indirect Speech Acts Is The Problem Of How It Is Possible For The Speaker To Say One Thing And Mean That But Also To Mean Something Else.