Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation

What is the relationship between words and reality? Which are the best ways to convince or persuade other people? Besides philosophy and grammar, ancient Greeks developed rhetoric to answer these questions. The twentieth-century brought the birth of semantics and pragmatics for a systematic study of linguistic meaning and linguistic acts. Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation brings together the work of leading contemporary scholars approaching those issues from various perspectives—from the old disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric to the newest thinking on semantics and pragmatics—to illuminate crucial aspects of meaning, communication, argumentation, and persuasion.

Kepa Korta is senior lecturer in philosophy and current director of the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information at the University of the Basque Country, where Joana Garmendia is a researcher.

March 2008