'Semantics and Pragmatics' is the title of my philosophy of language seminar. I read two articles tonight about the semantics/pragmatics distinction and I came to the conclusion that I am very excited about this seminar, and I am somewhat in over my head. Philosophy of Language is traditionally one of the most difficult and opaque subjects in philosophy, but I am interested because there aren't many Christian philosophers who do philosophy of language. Hence, there ought to be Christians doing philosophy of language.
So what is semantics? What is pragmatics? Both articles seemed to give different descriptions of each, but broadly constued semantics is what the words uttered mean. Pragmatics are what is implied by the words uttered. So if we take the utterance: 'On your left.' Semantics would tell us that this is relatively unhelpful apart from the context in which it is uttered. Perhaps we are driving down the road and I notice a deer to the left of the car and utter, 'On your left'. So this utterance has its full meaning upon understanding the context in which the utterance occurs.
Hopefully I can give a better description of the topic that I am covering later on... especially how it is related to the speech-act theory hermeneutic of Scripture.
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