Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

Abstract

Abstract The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.