Abstract
One need be neither a diplomat nor a lady to use the word perhaps to mean ‘yes’ one time and ‘no’ another. But what is the meaning of a word like perhaps if everyone can make it mean either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as he pleases? Can one in any sense talk about a fixed word meaning here? But if not, what is it Voltaire is telling us when he maintains that the diplomat’s uttering “yes” as well as the lady’s uttering “no” means ‘perhaps’?
When a diplomat says “yes”, he means ‘perhaps’; when he says “perhaps”, he means ‘no’; and when he says “no”, he is no diplomat.
When a lady says “no”, she means ‘perhaps’; when she says “perhaps”, she means ‘yes’; and when she says “yes”, she is no lady.
Voltaire
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper I am grateful to Jerry Edmond-son, Donald Freeman, Frans Plank, and David Schwarz. I also want to express my gratitude for stimulating discussions of the material involved to students of linguistics, semiotics, and philosophy of the universities of Hamburg, Montreal, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Stanford. The usual disclaimers apply, of course.
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Posner, R. (1980). Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connectives in Natural Language. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (eds) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_8
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