Pragmatics And Context: The Development Of Intensional Semantics

In the twentieth century, logic and philosophy of language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now, many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for contemporary philosophers of language or logicians to think of themselves as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the twentieth century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (for example the medieval period), but from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, earlier work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently.