Background
Sanchez de Zavala, Victor was born in 1926 in Pamplona, Spain.
Sanchez de Zavala, Victor was born in 1926 in Pamplona, Spain.
Trained initially as an engineer, Sanchez de Zavala later studied philosophy. notably philosophy of language.
Responsible for introducing much Austinian thought to Spanish readers.
The fundamental intuition at the core of Sanchez’s thought is that the sciences, including linguistics, form a linked whole. Attempts to compartmentalize those studies, and to treat individual disciplines or subdisciplines as autonomous, impoverish the sciences thus conceived, causing them to fail to do justice to the complexity of their subject matters. In the philosophy of science, this insight leads Sanchez to find analogies of practice in sciences such as logic and psychology, sociology and biology, biology and physics. In linguistics and the philosophy of language, which constitute Sanchez’s chief area of interest, the working out of this insight informs both his negative and his positive views. Thus, while appreciative of the degree of depth and rigour brought to linguistics by the theory of generative grammar, Sanchez deplores its tendency to treat syntax as a fundamental and autonomous feature of language. Equally, semantics taken alone is a mere subscience, dealing with an almost arbitrarily isolated aspect of language. Rather, any linguistic theory worthy of the name must be able to account for our capacity to produce and receive messages appropriate to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Hence his own linguistic theory he labels praxiology, to stress its attention to the human context of linguistic capacities and utterances. Illocutionary utterances, he argues, can only be understood in the context of an analysis of action. The implications of praxiology are far-reaching, since for Sanchez it is language which differentiates the human from the non-human: ‘La esencia humana estriba en el lenguaje’. Again, it is through language that we gain what understanding we have of being: ‘el lenguaje es la casa del ser, y el hombre su pastor’. The ramifications of the philosophy of language extend through anthropology to metaphysics.