Online research in philosophy

Consciousness WILLIAM G. LYCAN, 1987, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, xiii+165 pp., $23.50.

In this book, William Lycan reviews the diverse philosophical views on consciousness--including those of Kripke, Block, Campbell, Sellars, and Casteneda--and ...

An argument is developed at some length to show that any semantical theory which treats superficially nonperformative sentences as being governed by performative prefaces at some level of underlying structure must either leave those sentences semantically uninterpreted or assign them the wrong truth-conditions. Several possible escapes from this dilemma are examined; it is tentatively concluded that such hypotheses as the Ross-Lakoff-Sadock Performative Analysis should be rejected despite their attractions.