| Sumario: | "I think the story is indeed intuitive and straightforward much of our verbal activity presupposes that language has the power to represent things as being a certain way. However, in contemporary philosophy, the intuitive story has come under attack. Challenges to the intuitive story are the subject matter of the collection from which the quote is taken. Some challenges to the intuitive story concern specific regions of discourse that we might be inclined to regard as representational. Challengers contend that, contrary to initial appearances, the target discourse doesn't actually succeed in representing the world. This kind of challenge comes in two forms. According to one, the target discourse has indeed the function of representing the world, but is incapable of performing this function. According to the other, the representational surface of the discourse disguises the fact that its real function is nonrepresentational. Other challenges to the intuitive story are more wide-ranging they call into question the very idea that language is anywhere representational. Representing the world, on these views, is not among the things language is capable of doing, or even among the things that language is supposed to do. These challenges to the intuitive story have a wide variety of sources, but I think we can discern a common pattern in many of them: they rest on the assumption that a sentence can represent the world only if its meaning can receive a particular kind of explanation one that makes reference to semantic relations between the sentence and the bits of the world that the sentence represents. The link between the power to represent the world and explanations of meaning based on language-world connections is often treated as self-evident"--
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