PHIL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Naturalistic Fallacy, Grammatical Mood, Imperative Mood
26 May 2020
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In chapter 1 of your textbook, we looked at identifying the truth conditions of sentences. It is important to be able to recognize the literal content of a sentence, but often the point of an utterance is something other than communicating the literal content. For example: i might say: i swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (in the right context), by saying the words, i am doing something. I am not trying to tell the audience anything. Talking is not just about communicating the literal content of our sentences. There are, of course, many purposes for language. In fact, there are clearly many situations in which the purpose of making an assertion is to suggest the exact opposite of its literal content. Among the many things we can do with language are commanding, questioning and asserting. Each of these has a grammatical mood associated with it.
