Herman Cappelen

The conjunction of speech-act pluralism and semantic minimalism isn't as surprising as the outer material makes it seem--it occurred to me, albeit not by those names, immediately as occupying an obvious position on the logical space field of possible positions as soon as I learned about semantics vs. pragmatics debate--but they lay out their position and their reasons for holding it with exceptional clarity and accessability, no mean treat.

Their treatment of metaphysics and its relation to semantics strikes me as incredibly questionable, but the work they do in the philosophy of language is strong. I don't know if I agree with their ultimate conclusions, but in general it's hard to argue with their logic.

If nothing else, this work makes an invaluable contribution of philosophy of language but providing a new perspective on the current debates, in particular by shifting the emphasis from semantic vs. pragmatic to semantic content vs. speech act content. Regardless of whether they are right or wrong about the solution, I feel like I understand the problem after reading their book.… (altro)