Review: "The Language of Time," by Richard Gale

Abstract

This book is concerned with the clarification of certain philosophically significant features of "our ordinary or common-sense concept of time" (p. 3). The author's method throughout is that of "linguistic analysis or ordinary language philosophy" (ibid.). He suggests that rather than ask what time is, we should ask how temporal language is used in ordinary discourse. His avowed concern is with "declarative speech acts" and the pragmatic conditions of such speech acts (p. 208). His resulting analysis might accordingly best be understood for the readers of this journal as an informal study in pragmatics, i.e., that extension of semantics where the truth conditions of a sentence are relativized to a "context of use," as well as to an interpretation, the context perhaps including presuppositions (of a language user in that context) which, if false, render a sentence neither true nor false (relative to that context of use).