Robert Stalnaker explores the contexts in which speech takes place, the ways we represent them, and the roles they play in explaining the interpretation and dynamics of speech. His central thesis is the autonomy of pragmatics: the independence of theory about structure and function of discourse from theory about mechanisms serving those functions.
In the third volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, distinguished philosopher Robert Stalnaker here offers a defense of an ontology of propositions, and of some logical resources for representing them. He offers an austere formulation of a theory of propositions in a first-order extensional logic, but then uses the commitments of this theory to justify an enrichment to modal logic as an appropriate framework for regimented languages that are constructed to represent any of our scientific and philosophical commitments. His book adopts a self-consciously neo-Quinean methodology, and argues that the theory that is developed helps to motivate and clarify Quine's naturalistic metaphysical picture.