The paper discusses the theory of relevance, advanced in the middle of the 1980s by Dan Sperber and Deidra Wilson, in the context of opposition between the proponents of “ideal language philosophy”, or formal semantics, and adherents of “ordinary language philoso­phy”. Though the theory was created as a version of cognitive pragmatics, an area at the junction of cognitive sciences and theoretical linguistics, it is of undoubted interest for philosophical comprehension of language, verbal communication, and the nature of meaning. Treating (...) verbal communication as a cognitive process, Sperber and Wilson for­mulate the two most important principles underlying the process – the cognitive principle of relevance and the communicative principle of relevance. The paper explains the basic notions of the theory – ostensive communication, informative and communicative inten­tions, optimal relevance, explicature; it reveals the advantages that the authors of the the­ory see in the “inferential” model of communication over the “code” model and discusses how they present the process of understanding a speaker’s utterance by a hearer on the “implicit” and “explicit” levels and what role in the process they ascribe to pragmatic inferences. The account of the relevance theory is accompanied by its comparison with the picture of verbal communication elaborated by Paul Grice, and it is shown that though Sperber and Wilson make a start from Grice’s ideas in many respects, they intro­duce significant alterations and so they are regarded as representatives of post-Gricean pragmatics. In conclusion, it is examined how, according to the relevance theory, the se­mantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn. It is discussed how the proposed deci­sion alters the understanding of the nature of meaning and what consequences it has for philosophy. (shrink)

The paper discusses Cambridge pragmatism which is understood as certain views of a few Cam­bridge philosophers (B. Russell, Ch. Ogden, F. Ramsey) in the 1920s. Frank Ramsey is regarded as the crucial and most interesting proponent of those views. The philosophers who have introduced the term Cambridge pragmatism (H. Price, Ch. Misak) propose to reconsider the “standard” his­tory which, in their view, underestimates the influence of American pragmatism on the Cambridge philosophers in question. It, first of all, concerns Ramsey who, (...) in Misak’s words, created “the most compelling version” of pragmatism. The aim of the paper is to try to figure out, taking, as a kind of test, the problem of belief which was intensively discussed by both the American prag­matists and the Cambridge philosophers of the 1920s and the particular solution of which consti­tutes, so to say, the kernel of pragmatism, which of the approaches to understanding Ramsey’s view – the standard history or Misak’s history – is more justified. It is concluded that the differ­ences between the two approaches are determined by the fact that they evaluate Ramsey’s ideas from the position of different conceptions of pragmatism. It is noted that a more interesting task for historians of philosophy is to explain why such organic syntheses of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, as we have in the case of Ramsey, are possible. (shrink)