The first part of the paper deals with the key question of the Searle-Derrida debate, namely, with the question of conceptual ''exactness'' and applicability of concepts to facts. I argue that Derrida makes a strict distinction between the exactness in the realm of concepts and the exactness in the realm of facts. Supposing that it is not correct to argue against him - as Searle does - that concepts cannot be exact because there are no strict boundaries between facts. The second part of the paper deals with a distinction used by John Searle: The distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker’s meaning. According to Searle linguistic meaning is constituted outside a particular context of use whereas speaker’s meaning is embedded in a particular situation. I argue this distinction is problematic as far as any meaning is constituted in a particular utterance and in a particular context of use., První část práce se zabývá klíčovou otázkou debaty Searle-Derrida, konkrétně otázkou konceptuální ,,přesnosti'' a aplikovatelnosti konceptů na fakta. Tvrdím, že Derrida rozlišuje mezi přesností v oblasti pojmů a přesností v oblasti faktů. Předpokládejme, že není správné argumentovat proti němu - jak to dělá Searle -, že pojmy nemohou být přesné, protože mezi fakty neexistují striktní hranice. Druhá část práce se zabývá rozlišením, které používá John Searle: Rozlišení mezi jazykovým významem a významem mluvčího. Podle Searle je lingvistický význam vytvořen mimo konkrétní kontext použití, zatímco význam mluvčího je zakotven v určité situaci., and Tomáš Koblížek
The necessity to distinguish between ontological (cognitive, extralinguistic) content and linguistic (''literal'') meaning has its sources in European structural linguistics. The idea that the task of linguistics itself is to study language in its ''form'' rather than in its ''substance'' is further elaborated in the Prague Linguistic Circle. However, analyzing concrete language data we often face many open questions: It is not always clear how to divide the knowledge of language from the knowledge of the world, which general criteria could be used for the separation of (language) ambiguity and vagueness etc. The present contribution cannot be aimed at the solution of these non-trivial distinctions; we only present some Czech examples as a challenge for consideration, which we believe to be useful for the determination of this boundary. The examples belonging to the different phenomena of language structure are analyzed from the point of view of the asymmetry between the layer of content and the layer of meaning. The examples with different aspectual and tense forms are used as an exemplification of the asymmetry ''same content - different meanings''. The reflexive forms, dative case dependent on the verb, coreference with infinitival and other constructions serve as examples of the situation where instances of different content are not articulated as oppositions in linguistic meaning but rather display structural ambiguity. Despite of these problems, we are convinced that without keeping the distinction between linguistic meaning and cognitive content during the analysis of language data the description of the language system is impossible.
In this paper, we will focus our attention on two basic semantic notions: linguistic expression and relation of synonymy (lexical synonymy). We will try to analyze the notions in three semantic fields: logic, linguistic, and pragmatic (F. Recanati), and see whether these three fields can provide us with satisfactory solutions. We will show that the pragmatic conception of semantics is not satisfactory in explaining neither the notion of linguistic expression nor the notion of synonymy - two very basic semantic notions; which could be done in logical and linguistic semantics. and Barbora Geistová Čakovská