Three Demonstrations and a Funeral and Other Essays

The result of the collaboration between three distinguished philosophers, this book comprises the best sample of one of the most original theories in contemporary philosophy of language and communication—Critical Pragmatics. They present the development of the theory from its initial sprout, with “Three Demonstrations and a Funeral” (2006) as its first visible result, to a critical clarification of its tenets in “Critical Pragmatics: Nine Misconceptions” (2023). After Korta and Perry’s Critical Pragmatics (2011), this is the most important book on Critical Pragmatics, as it was conceived, developed and applied by its creators. Having de Ponte, Korta and Perry’s most important papers together on one place will be of great value to both philosophers and linguists.

María de Ponte is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the philosophy department of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and director of the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI). Her research interests include philosophy of language and philosophy of language and mathematics, with a special focus on the philosophy of time and on problems of reference and the nature of abstracts entities. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters.

Kepa Korta is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the philosophy department of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and researcher of the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI). His research interests include the philosophy of language and mind, semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of action and the philosophy of art. He has authored and edited several books and numerous papers. He is the editor-in-chief of Gogoa, journal of Language, Knowledge, Communication and Action.

John Perry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he taught from 1974 to 2008, and from the University of California, Riverside, where he taught from 2008 to 2014. He has written books and articles on semantics (including pioneering work on situation semantics, with Jon Barwise), personal identity, the philosophy of language consciousness and other philosophical topics. He is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research, including honorary degrees from Doane College, the University of the Basque Country, and Bochum University. He is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

Praise

“Critical Pragmatics took as its starting point John Perry’s ground-breaking ‘reflexive-referential’ theory according to which linguistic utterances have multiple kinds of truth-conditions (reflexive, referential, hybrid). Building on that foundation, Kepa Korta and María de Ponte together with Perry have developed original and insightful solutions to many of the key issues in philosophical semantics/pragmatics, including the saying/implicating distinction, pragmatic ‘intrusions’ into the proposition expressed, the problem of ‘Grice’s circle’, the minimalism/contextualism debate, Frege’s identity puzzle, the nature of speakers’ referential intentions, and the role of indexicals and other referential devices.

“It is wonderful to have all seventeen of these papers (previously dispersed across myriad journals and books) together in a single volume, amply demonstrating the explanatory power and depth of the Critical Pragmatics paradigm. The volume will be an indispensable reference for anyone wanting to understand how linguistic communication works.
—Robyn Carston (University College London)

“María de Ponte, Kepa Korta and John Perry’s Three Demonstrations and a Funeral and other Essays does not just bring together a set of individually important contributions to issues at the intersection of semantics and pragmatics. Taken together, the papers offer a compelling picture of what we say and do with our utterances, thereby demonstrating the fruitfulness of the theoretical framework originating in Perry’s Reference and Reflexivity (2001). It should be read by any philosophers interested in language, mind and action.
—Stacie Friend (University of Edinburgh)

“The papers in this volume sharpen Critical Pragmatics, focusing critically on approaches that postulate some form of pragmatic intrusion, and expand it, applying it to a variety of issues, including fictional names, the passage of time, Frege’s notion of identity and the notion of luck. The last paper contains an extremely well-articulated defense of the theory from a series of pervasive (and incomprehensible, one might add) misconceptions.

“Having all these papers in a single volume will be an inestimable tool for anyone interested in critical pragmatics and, more generally, for anyone interested in reference, communication, and the semantics and pragmatics of referential devices.
—Genoveva Martí (University of Barcelona)

“Started with the collaboration between John Perry and Kepa Korta, this kaleidoscopic selection of papers is enriched in its last part with the intrusion of a third element, María de Ponte, who brings new subjects into focus, such as the topic of luck and of fictional entities. Most of the papers mix a high analytic endeavor with the levity of multifarious examples that help clarify the most irksome conceptual points. Even the old fashioned Fregean themes find a new illumination, following the idea that the late Frege’s suggestion to consider truth values as the referent of a sentence obliged many philosophers to make a long detour to reach a new interpretation of what he suggested in the introduction of his Ideography. And, eventually, readers will find, not so hidden inside the selection of papers, new insight on the original topic from which all started: the essential demonstratives.
—Carlo Penco (University of Genoa)

“John Perry’s reflexive-referential theory, as expounded (inter alia) in his masterpiece Reference and Reflexivity, applies tools from action theory to issues in the philosophy of language and communication. Pragmatics as a discipline evolved from a new conception of language as action put forward by philosophers such as John Austin, Paul Grice and Peter Strawson (not to mention Wittgenstein). The affinities between these different approaches are obvious and open up an interesting research program: explore the potential of Perry’s reflexive-referential theory to illuminate and hopefully resolve pending issues in pragmatics. Carrying out this research program was the aim of Korta’s and Perry’s first joint book, Critical Pragmatics, and it remains the aim of this major collection of papers where de Ponte, Korta and Perry attempt to arbitrate the current debates on the semantics/pragmatics distinction, the minimalism/contextualism debate, etc. The book offers new insights on key issues and is a must read for philosophers and linguists working in that area.
—François Recanati (Collége de France)

March 2025