Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This turn was marked by two assumptions: that it was primarily the semantics of language that was relevant to broader philosophical issues, and that declarative assertions were the only verbal acts of serious philosophical interest. In ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance reject these assumptions. Looking at philosophical problems starting with the pragmatics of language, they develop a typology of pragmatic categories of speech within which declaratives have no uniquely privileged position. They demonstrate that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives.

Entering into conversation with the work of Anglo-American philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, and Continental philosophers including Heidegger and Althusser, ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ offers solutions (or dissolutions) to long-standing philosophical problems, such as how perception can be both inferentially fecund and responsive to an empirical world, and how moral judgment can be both objective and inherently motivating.

Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note to the Reader
1. Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse: Mapping the Terrain
1.1 Varieties of Pragmatism
1.2 Two Distinctions among Normative Statuses
1.3 A Typology of Speech Acts
1.4 More about Agent-Relativity and Agent-Neutrality
1.5 Several Caveats
1.6 Entitlement and Epistemic Responsibility
1.7 Where We Go From Here
2. Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception
2.1 Observatives
2.2 Observatives and Occasion Sentences
2.3 Observing-That and the Declarative Fallacy
2.4 The Ineliminability of the First-Person Voice
3. The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity
3.1 Observatives, Observation, and Answerability to the World
3.2 Intersubjectivity
3.3 Objectivity
4. Anticlimactic Interlude: Why Performatives Are Not That Important to Us
5. Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims
5.1 The Pragmatics of Prescriptives
5.2 Four Ways of Telling Someone What to Do
5.3 Two Alternative Accounts
5.4 Reasons, Claims, and Addresses
5.5 Coda: Categorical Imperatives
6. Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics of Recognition
6.1 Two Kinds of Recognitives
6.2 Vocatives
6.3 Acknowledgments
7. The Essential Second Person
7.1 Concrete Habitation of the Space of Reasons
7.2 Second-Person Speech
7.3 Tellings, Holdings, and Transcendental Vocatives
7.4 Speech as Communication and as Calling
8. "We called each other Yo"
8.1 Interpellation and Induction into Normative Space
8.2 Membership in a Discursive Community
8.3 How Many Discursive Communities Are There?
8.4 Sharing a World and Learning to See
8.5 On the Equiprimordiality and Entanglement of 'Yo!' and 'Lo!'
8.6 Fugue
Appendix (with Greg Restall): Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Normative Statuses
Index