Sollen between semantics and pragmatics
pp. 215-220
in: Rosaria Egidi (ed), In search of a new humanism, Berlin, Springer, 1999Abstract
The pragmatic ambiguity (or better pragmatic ambivalence) of deontic sentences is a very well-known phenomenon. This phenomenon has been isolated by the German logician Christoph Sigwart (1830–1905). Deontic sentences (ought-sentences) are subject to a double interpretation: they may be used to prescribe norms (prescriptive deontic sentences) or they may be used to describe norms (descriptive deontic sentences).1
