At the birth of analytic philosophy Frege created a paradigm that
is centrally important to how meaning has been understood in the
twentieth century. Frege invented the now familiar distinctions of
sense and force, of sense and reference, of concept and object. He
introduced the conception of sentence meaning as residing in
truth-conditions and argued that semantics is a normative
enterprise distinct from psychology. Most importantly, he created
modern quantification theory, engendering the idea that the
syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic underpin the meanings
of natural-language sentences. Stephen Barker undertakes to
overthrow Frege's paradigm, rejecting all the above-mentioned
features. The framework he offers is a speech-act-based approach to
meaning in which semantics is entirely subsumed by pragmatics. In
this framework: meaning resides in syntax and pragmatics;
sentence-meanings are not propositions but speech-act types;
word-meanings are not objects, functions, or properties, but again
speech-act types; pragmatic phenomena one would expect not to
figure in semantics, such as pretence, enter into the logical form
of sentences; a compositional semantics is provided by showing how
speech-act types combine together to form complex speech-act types;
the syntactic structures invoked are not those of quantifiers, open
sentences, variables, variable-binding, etc., rather they are
structures specific to speech-act forms, which link logical form
and surface grammar very closely. According to Barker, a natural
language - a system of thought - is an emergent entity that arises
from the combination of simple intentional structures, and certain
non-representational cognitive states. It is embedded in, and part
of, a world devoid of normative facts qua extra-linguistic
entities. The world, in which the system is embedded, is a totality
of particular states of affairs. There is no logical complexity in
re; it contains mereological complexity only. Some truths have
truth-makers, but others, logically complex truths, lack them.
Nevertheless, the truth-predicate is univocal in meaning. Renewing
Meaning is a radical, ambitious work which offers to transform the
semantics of natural language.
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