Meaning, saying, truth
pp. 177-197
in: Martin Gustafsson, Lars Hertzberg (eds), The practice of language, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
In a series of books and articles, Charles Travis has explored the consequences of what he calls the speaker use sensitivity or occasion-sensitivity of what words with a given meaning say on particular occasions of utterance.1 According to Travis, this phenomenon was discovered by Wittgenstein and Austin, and he sometimes describes his own investigations as mere elaborations of ideas already present in the writings of these two philosophers. Allegedly, the consequences of Wittgenstein's and Austin's discovery are radical. To begin with, this discovery is said to undermine a picture of linguistic significance that "is attractive enough to have been shared by nearly everyone [since Frege], up to and including the present day."2 Moreover, Travis argues, an alternative general conception emerges which goes against many deep-rooted intuitions of how language works.
