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The broad aim of this work is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental/neural symbols are able to capture the world, that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. Paul Horwich’s answer takes off from Wittgenstein’s appealingly demystifying remark, that the meaning of a term is nothing over and above its use, and proceeds with a groundbreaking articulation and defence of that idea, showing how it can deal successfully with Quinean and Kripkean forms of scepticism about meaning, with the various normative features of thought and language, with the paradoxical phenomenon of vagueness, with the way that word-meanings combine to yield sentence-meanings, and with Chomsky-style models of the language faculty. The main lines of this theory were first suggested in Horwich’s 1998 book, Meaning. The present volume (which requires no familiarity with its predecessor) provides a host of improved, formulations, fresh arguments, responses to criticism, and extensions of the position into new areas.

The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a distinction between two different kinds of sentence: synthetic sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in part because of what they mean, whereas analytic sentences — like all bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides — are different; they are true in virtue of meaning and so, no matter what the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it will be true. The distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to be knowable in a special way; one can know that all bachelors are unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But many 20th-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity didn't even make sense and that the analytic/synthetic distinction was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments. But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of language — semantic externalism — on which it is possible to see how the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those proposed in the original debate. This book argues that it hasn't. It uses the tools of contemporary philosophy of language to outline a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with semantic externalism, and defends that view against the old Quinean arguments. It then goes on to draw out some surprising epistemological consequences.

So far as language and meaning are concerned, Donald Davidson and Willard Van Orman Quine are typically regarded as birds of a feather. This book urges first of all that they cannot be. Quine’s most basic and general philosophical commitment is to his methodological naturalism, which is incompatible with Davidson’s main commitments. In particular, it is not possible to endorse, from Quine’s perspective, the roles played by the concepts truth and reference in Davidson’s philosophy of language; Davidson’s employment of the concept of truth is from Quine’s point of view needlessly ambitious; and his use of the concept of reference cannot be divorced from unscientific ‘intuition’. Second, the book puts the case positively in favour of Quine’s naturalism and its corollary, naturalized epistemology. It is possible to give a consistent account of language without problematic uses of the concepts truth and reference, which in turn makes a strident naturalism much more plausible.

This book tries to present in brief compass a metaphysical system, matured (as is hoped) over many years. By metaphysics is understood an account of the fundamental categories of being, such notions as property, relation, causality. These notions are more abstract than the results of scientific inquiry, and are controversial among scientists as well as among philosophers. The book sprang from lectures given to graduate students, and has deliberately been kept at an informal level. It includes some explanations not required in a book for professional philosophers. The argument is developed in sixteen short chapters. It is argued that the world is a world of states of affairs, involving universals and particulars. The notion of finding suitable truthmakers for truths grows in importance as the book proceeds.

Objects of Metaphor offers a philosophical account of the phenomenon of metaphor which is radically different from others in the literature. Yet for all its difference, the underlying rationale of the account is genuinely ecumenical. If one adopts its perspective, one should be able to understand the substantial correctness of many other accounts, while at the same time seeing why they are not in the end completely correct. The origins of the account lie in an examination of the conception of predication. Unreflectively thought of as a task accomplished by words, it is argued that predication, or something very much like it, can also be accomplished by non-word objects (‘objects’ here include events, states of affairs, situations, actions and the like). Liberated in this way from words, predication becomes one central element in the account of metaphor. The other element is the move from language to objects which, adapting an idea of Quine’s, is thought of as the limiting case of semantic descent. Whilst the Objects of Metaphor account presents other accounts in a new light, its main importance lies in what it says about metaphor itself. Powerful and flexible enough to cope with the syntactic complexity typical of genuine metaphor, it offers novel conceptions of both the relationship between simile and metaphor and the notion of dead metaphor. Additionally, it shows why metaphor is a robust theoretic kind, related to other tropes such as synecdoche and metonymy, but not to be confused with tropes generally, or with the figurative and non-literal.

This is a collection of papers, written over many years, with substantial postscripts tying them together and giving an updated perspective on them. The first five are on the notions of truth and truth‐conditions, and their role in a theory of meaning and of the content of our mental states. The next five deal with what I call ‘factually defective discourse’—discourse that gives rise to issues about which, it is tempting to say that, there is no fact of the matter as to the right answer; one particular kind of factually defective discourse is called ‘indeterminacy’, and it gets the bulk of the attention. The final bunch of papers deal with issues about objectivity, closely related to issues about factual defectiveness; two deal with the question of whether the axioms of mathematics are as objective as is often assumed, and one deals with the question of whether our epistemological methods are as objective as they are usually assumed to be.

A language is second‐order, or higher‐order, if it has bound variables that range over properties or sets of the items in the range of the ordinary, first‐order variables. This book presents a formal development of second‐ and higher‐order logic and an extended argument that higher‐order systems have an important role to play in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. The development includes the languages, deductive systems, and model‐theoretic semantics for higher‐order languages, and the basic and advanced results in its meta‐theory: completeness, compactness, and the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems for Henkin semantics, and the failure of those results for standard semantics. Argues that second‐order theories and formalizations, with standard semantics, provide better models of important aspects of mathematics than their first‐order counterparts. Despite the fact that Quine is the main opponent of second‐order logic (arguing that second‐order logic is set‐theory in disguise), the present argument is broadly Quinean, proposing that there is no sharp line dividing mathematics from logic, especially the logic of mathematics. Also surveys the historical development in logic, tracing the emergence of first‐order logic as the de facto standard among logicians and philosophers. The connection between formal deduction and reasoning is related to Wittgensteinian issues concerning rule‐following. The book closes with an examination of several alternatives to second‐order logic: first‐order set theory, infinitary languages, and systems that are, in a sense, intermediate between first order and second order.

Looks at the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics. This argument urges us to place mathematical entities on the same ontological footing as other theoretical entities indispensable to our best scientific theories. The indispensability argument has come under serious scrutiny in recent times, with many influential philosophers unconvinced of its cogency. This book outlines the indispensability argument in considerable detail, before defending it against various challenges.

Although the focus is squarely on the indispensability argument, in order to appreciate the argument's full force, it is necessary to consider many other interesting and related topics. These include questions about ontological commitments and the applications of mathematics to physical theories. Of particular interest here is the Quinean backdrop from which the indispensability argument emerges. This backdrop consists of the doctrines of holism and naturalism. The latter is crucial to the whole indispensability debate, so a considerable portion of this work is spent discussing naturalism.

Contains thirteen essays published by Barry Stroud between 1965 and 2000 on central topics in the philosophy of language and epistemology. In a volume that generally deals with the philosophical questions of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought, there are some papers devoted to specific questions of Wittgenstein's philosophy, as well as papers on Quine, Searle, Davidson, and David Pears.

The tenor of the essays on meaning is critical of reductive attempts to elucidate meaning and understanding ‘from outside’—i.e. without summoning intentional vocabulary referring to what speakers mean and understand in relation to each other. In view of considerations regarding the indispensably semantical nature of explanatory accounts of meaning, an appeal to speakers’ conformity to linguistic practice must satisfy the requirements of a thick, semantical description of the meaning of words in a community. There will be no satisfactory theories of meaning solely in terms of non‐semantic, non‐intentional regularities. In the author's estimation, this idea runs close to Wittgenstein's treatment of ‘inner’ or ‘private’ objects. The first essay in this collection addresses the attribution of a ‘conventionalist’ position to Wittgenstein in summation of his thought on necessity and logical truth. The author looks askance at Michael Dummett's conventionalist reading of Wittgenstein and takes it to task accordingly. ‘Inference, Belief and Understanding’ (essay 2) re‐examines the question of being ‘forced’ to a conclusion in the context of Lewis Carroll's ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’. It is argued, here and throughout, that it is important to grasp the implications of the kind of regress besetting Achilles for a theory of understanding and the mind. The threat of regress is a key constraint on philosophical accounts of understanding viewed as a capacity possessed by the speaker. In his third essay ‘Evolution and the Necessity of Thought’, the author asks whether we can hold steadfast to a notion of necessity and an evolutionary or historical story of the acquisition of human knowledge. Wittgenstein's arguments against the existence of a private language are treated in the fifth and again, in more detail, in the final essay in this volume— the author notes his intention to look at the question relatively unencumbered by existing scholarship in the hope of drawing out the very idea of what Wittgenstein was doing in his philosophy. The collection of essays on Wittgenstein includes a study of Wittgenstein on meaning, understanding, and community (essay 6), which partly overlaps with an essay on translation that additionally revisits the problem of regress and its implications for semantic competence (essay 8). It is argued that the indeterminacy of meaning with respect to a certain class of facts has the consequence that meaning is indeterminate tout court only if those facts are the only available facts; but a ‘community practice’ view of meaning has no such consequence. A fuller treatment of some of these topics is given in ‘Mind, Meaning and Practice’ (essay 11), which examines the idea of meaning as use, and ostensive teaching in relation to Wittgenstein's discussion of meaning and distorted conception of the mental.

The essays on Quine (essay 7 and 10) consider the doctrine of physicalism and the question of conceptual schemes respectively. Searle's theory of intentionality (‘background’) supposes that there are attitudes that are mental, though pre‐intentional and non‐representational; considerations are brought against Searle in essay 9. The work on Davidson provides the renewed occasion for attacking the idea that linguistic competence or understanding is a matter of applying general rules or conventions to particular utterances (essay 12). A central theme of this book—the threat of regress and the pressure it exerts on semantic theory—is brought out with reference to the theory of understanding, which locates linguistic competence in the application of general knowledge to particular utterances. It is argued that such theories invariably fall foul of regress. A profitable semantic theory should combine the insight that explaining understanding and meaning is aptly fulfilled by invoking speakers’ abilities and knowledge, yet without positing additional mental entities, with a recognition that the abilities and knowledge in question go beyond mere relations between expressions.

Conceptual analysis is currently out of favour, especially in North America. This is partly through misunderstanding of its nature. Properly understood, conceptual analysis is not a mysterious activity discredited by Quine that seeks after the a priori in some hard‐to‐understand sense. It is, rather, something familiar to everyone, philosophers and non‐philosophers alike—or so I argue. Another reason for its unpopularity is a failure to appreciate the need for conceptual analysis. The cost of repudiating it has not been sufficiently appreciated; without it, we cannot address a whole raft of important questions.

I have always been suspicious of excessively abstract theorizing in philosophy. I think that an important test of metaphilosophical claims is whether they make good sense in the context of particular problems. The discussion in the book is, accordingly, anchored in particular philosophical debates. The basic framework is developed in the first three chapters via a consideration of the role of conceptual analysis in the debate over the doctrine in metaphysics known as physicalism, with digressions on free will, meaning, personal identity, motion, and change, and then applied in the last three chapters to current debates over colour and ethics.

This book discusses the nature of identity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth. Its main claims are that identity, existence, and truth are logical properties, that predicates are singular terms that refer to properties, and that necessity (and other modalities) are modes of instantiation of properties by objects. The book develops a realist anti‐naturalist stance on logical properties, which takes logical notions at face value, and refuses to reduce them to other notions. Two further contentions central to this work are, first, that the quantifier has been overrated as an instrument of logico‐linguistic analysis; and secondly, that past attempts to define logical notions such as identity or existence have been largely unsuccessful.