Pragmatics/History/1950s

Before
1600s
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1950s
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1950s

1950 Rapoport

• Literature/1950/Rapoport ^[+]

1950 Strawson

• Strawson, Peter (1950). "On Referring." Mind, vol. 59, no. 235, pp. 320-344. ^[+]

1951 Lewin

• Literature/1951/Lewin ^[+]

1952 Hutchins

• Hutchins, Robert, ed. (1952). Great Books of the Western World. Encyclopaedia Britannica. ^[+]

1953 Deutsch

• Literature/1953/Deutsch ^[+]

1953 Wittgenstein

• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing. ^[+]

1954 Black

• Black, Max (1954). "Metaphor." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, pp. 273-294. ^[+]

1954 Chase

• Literature/1954/Chase ^[+]

1955 Austin

• Austin, J. L. (1955). How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. ^[+]

1955 McCarthy

• McCarthy, John; Marvin Minsky; Nathan Rochester & Claude Shannon (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. ^[+]

1956 Whorf

• Literature/1956/Whorf ^[+]

1957 Cherry

• Cherry, Colin (1957). On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism . The M.I.T. Press, 1966. ^[+]

The suggestion that words are symbols for things, actions, qualities, relationships, et cetera, is naive, a gross simplification. Words are slippery customers. The full meaning of a word does not appear until it is placed in its context, and the context may serve an extremely subtle function -- as with puns, or double entendre. And even then the "meaning" will depend upon the listener, upon the speaker, upon their entire experience of language, upon their knowledge of one another, and upon the whole situation. Words do not "mean things" in a one-to-one relation like a code. Words, too, are empirical signs, not copies or models of anything; truly, onomatopoeia and gestures frequently seem to possess resemblance, but this resemblance does not bear too close examination. A cockerel may seem to say cook-a-doodle-do to an Englishman, but a German thinks it says kikeriki, and a Japanese kokke-kekko. Each can paint only with the phonetic sound of his own language. (p. 10-11)

— From What Is It That We Communicate?

See also

• q: Colin Cherry

1957 Osgood

• Literature/1957/Osgood ^[+]

1957 Skinner

• Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Acton, Massachusetts: Copley Publishing Group. ^[+]

1958 Polanyi

• Literature/1958/Polanyi ^[+]

1959 Chomsky

• Chomsky, Noam (1959). "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior." Language, 35(1): 26-57. ^[+]

1959 Gellner

• Gellner, Ernest (1959). Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology. London: Gollancz. ^[+]

1959 Snow

• Snow, Charles Percy (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Rede Lecture). Cambridge University Press, 1959. ^[+]

Notes