Philosophical Pragmatics

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the last two decades there has been a huge growth in both general interest in the pragmatic function of language and also in mobilizing theories of pragmatics in the service of broader philosophical explanation. That is what we will be studying in this course: what you do when you engage in linguistic acts, how to understand the distinctions between the different things, and how the study of these matters can help us understand issues in ontology, meta-ontology, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of science etc. We will read a bunch of stuff by Quill Kukla and I - sometimes together, sometimes individually, sometimes in collaboration with others - but branch out from there to new work in political philosophy, gender, race, philosophy of science, moral philosophy, and epistemology.