Directives, optatives, and value statements

Kazimierz Opałek

pp. 263-293

in: Kazimierz Opałek, Selected papers in legal philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

This study is an attempt at a comparative analysis of directives, optatives, and value statements from the point of view of the philosophy of language. The standpoint represented here is that there are certain general features of language independent of those of the particular languages and that there are such general features specific of the area of the statements in question. Our approach to the problem of these features will not be an a priori one, we shall pay strict attention to the facts of natural languages while making resort to some reconstructionist devices.¹ Vital syntactic-semantic problems will be involved here, but nevertheless, an important role has to be ascribed to the pragmatic analysis as a tool indispensable in dealing with statements of these particular kinds.