Department Colloquium

Title: Speech acts, exclamatives, and emotive content: the Stoic approach

Abstract: What is the content of exclamative sentences like “the Alcázar is beautiful!” and “how she looks like her sister”? How does it relate to speech acts? To propositions? To truth-values? These are questions which the Stoics contemplated. From a contemporary perspective, their answers combine the familiar with the unorthodox, which makes them thought provoking. I trace the – sparse – evidence of the Stoic treatment of such contents in our sources, show how it is rooted in Stoic logic, semantics, and metaphysics, consider how it connects with emotivism, and explore its philosophical relevance.