Reply to Recanati

Abstract

Recanati is looking in detail at some things described in Varieties only with very broad strokes. I will try here to think and explain more carefully. Thank you, Francis, for so carefully and sympathetically setting the stage. But before stepping into the scene, I want to lower a somewhat different backdrop, and recast a character or two terminological adjustments. I would rather compare the semantic project of Part HI of Varieties with as outlined in Barwise and Perry (1983), a semantics that both Barwise and Etchemendy, whose book Recanati calls to his support, originally helped to design. Barwise and Perry (B&P) were unhappy with traditional semantic programs that seek propositions or intensions as correspondents for sentences, entities that float free of any given situation or world. Citing Gibson (1979) and Dretske (1980), their plan was to begin by describing natural signs carrying natural informational content and then to spell out how conventional linguistic forms carried intentional informational content in an analogous way.