The Contextualization And Significance Of Strawson's Referring Theory

About the referring problems, there are two schools: one is logical empiricism, and its subject is formal language; the other is the school of ordinary language, and its subject is ordinary language. They have tried to give a satisfactory answer to the problem. Strawson has researched the referring problem in the perspective of daily language, and developed the previous views from the context. We want to conduct a comprehensive analysis and interpretation for the Strawson's referring theory from the contextual perspective.There are three parts in the paper. The first part describes the origin and connotation of Strawson's referring theory. The Strawson's referring theory is the development from the previous views, including Frege's referring theory, Russell's description theory, and Austin's speech act theory. For these theories, Strawson has developed the useful and discarded the useless, and put forward his own theory of referring, which includes three aspects: the difference between referring and Significance, three semantic theory and function of expression. These have promoted the development of descriptions in the philosophy and the philosophy of language.The second part is the emphasis and difficulty. The author attempts to analyze Strawson's referring theory from the contextual perspective. The contextualization of Strawson's referring theory performances three aspects: linguistic contextualization, process contextualization and presentation contextualization. Strawson's linguistic contextualization is the development from linguistic context to extra-linguistic context, process contextualization is the transition from static context to dynamic context, and presentation context is the transformation from dominant context to recessive context. However, in the transition process, we can't completely separate the linguistic context from extra-linguistic context, the static context from dynamic context, the dominant context from recessive context, because there are distinctions and connections between them and their relationship is auxiliary to each other. From these, the author finds that Strawson's referring theory has developed from the grammar referring to pragmatic referring, making it become more mature and more scientific.The author discusses the significance of the contextualization of Strawson's referring theory. Its impact is very huge in the philosophy and the philosophy of language. We analyze and interpret the theory from the philosophy of language, analytic philosophy and contextual theory. Firstly, it broadens the research field of philosophy of language; Secondly, it deepens the research scan of analytic philosophy; Thirdly, it enriches the research model of contextual theory. Strawson's referring theory plays a key role in philosophy of language.By two methods of historical analysis and system analysis, we collect and study the domestic and overseas scholars'viewpoints, and then form the systemic comprehension for Strawson's referring theory.