Reviews for Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism

The average rating for Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-20 00:00:00 Pleasure Pryncess This is a book on how language helps us to take "stances". Stances are things like evaluations or assessments: "that coffee is bad". The best part of this book (it is an edited volume) are the couple of chapters that explore specific grammatical resources like, e.g., "I guess" in English or the translational equivalent of "in my opinion" in Finnish. These chapters are explicitly interactional in focus: they show how these kinds of phrases function to mitigate a stance (for the sake of politeness), or show that the speaker is aware of ("recognizes") alternative points of view (even if he/she holds a contrary one). The book fails, however, in its less nitty-gritty, more theoretical pieces. The notion "stance" is just way too slippery a concept to be of much use, I've decided. What isn't a stance? Isn't "Mom is coming home for dinner" a stance of some kind? You could very well respond "Well, I guess..."

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-18 00:00:00 Jenna Haze A really useful book that unpacks the varied and diverse interpretations of stance, to put forward a clearer notion of stance taking as an interactional event.