Pragmatics and Semantics and Husserl and Derrida

This piece undertakes to sketch the contemporary approaches toward meaning known as pragmatics and semantics. Today, this pairing is associated with a controversy or question that concerns the proposition (the portion of what is said or meant or expressed by sentences, capable of being true or false). Yet, while the pragmatics/semantics debate attests to the proposition's precise status being in doubt, the underlying belief remains that the work of the proposition or something like it - e.g., utterances, a portion of which function propositionally - eventually can be established. Jacques Derrida in his writings on Husserl questions even this assumption. He argues that there is an internal limit to propositionality (without abandoning this notion entirely), thanks to a writing (ecriture) that ultimately exceeds it. Moreover, Derrida focuses on themes (in particular, the index and what Husserl called essentially occasional expressions) that are central for the discussions of semantics and pragmatics, while a good deal of common ground exists between Derrida's interlocutor, Husserl, and the analytic tradition. Accordingly, after here reviewing pragmatics and semantics, and some of the complexity of their relation, I turn to Husserl and to Derrida ultimately for a perspective that calls into doubt these projects as such.