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This book argues that Augustine's Confessions may fruitfully be read as a series of encounters with language and signs: as a baby learning to speak, as a schoolboy orator, student, professor of rhetoric, and Christian exegete. While language is a universal human characteristic, the fact of languages tends to divide humans into arbitrary and uncomprehending communities; and even in individual communities, language can be manipulated or simply misunderstood. On the theological level, Augustine faces question of how to describe (and invoke) an absolute and immutable God in language that is necessary arbitrary and mutable. This book seeks to explore these questions through a close analysis of specific linguistic features of the work, such as his use of the language of Roman comedy, his attitudes towards Greek, or his use of biblical Latin. Consideration is given also to such ‘paralinguistic’ activities as singing or laughing, and to the relationship between the spoken and the written word.

This book provides a response to the argument for meaning scepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke asks what makes it the case that anybody ever means anything by any word, and argues that there are no facts of the matter as to what anybody ever means. Kripke's argument has inspired a lively and extended debate in the philosophy of language, as it raises some of the most fundamental issues in the field: namely, the reality, privacy, and normativity of meaning. The book argues that in order to achieve the radical conclusion that there are no facts as to what a person means by a word, the sceptic must rely on the thesis that meaning is normative, and that this thesis fails. Since any ‘sceptical solution’ to the sceptical problem is irremediably incoherent, the book concludes that there must be a fact of the matter about what we mean. In addition to providing an overview of the debate on meaning and content scepticism, this book presents a detailed discussion of the contributions made by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Robert Brandom, Fred Dretske, John McDowell, and Crispin Wright, among others, to the controversy surrounding Kripke's argument. The issues considered include the normativity of meaning and its relation to the normativity of moral judgments, reductive and non-reductive theories of meaning, deflationism about truth and meaning, and the privacy of meaning.

This book examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various meta-linguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early — kids are told, “That's called a rabbit”. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. This book shows that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our meta-linguistic practices. In Part II, the book examines and rejects the four leading meta-linguistic theories, and offers a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance.

This book presents the thesis that knowledge is an absolutely fundamental relation, with an indispensable role to play in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mind and language. Knowledge has been generally assumed to be a propositional attitude like belief. But this book argues that knowledge is not a relation to a content; rather, it's a relation to a fact. This point of view allows us to explain many of the concepts of philosophical logic in terms of knowledge. The book provides a theory of facts as structured combinations of particulars and universals, and presents a theory of content as the property of a mental act that determines its value for getting knowledge. It also defends a theory of representation in which the conceptual structure of content is taken to picture the fact it represents. This permits definitions to be given of reference, truth, and necessity in terms of knowledge. Turning to the metaphysics of mind and language, the book argues that a conscious state is one that is identical with knowledge of its own occurrence. This allows us to characterize subjectivity, and, by illuminating the ‘I’-concept, allows us to gain a better understanding of the concept of a person. Language is then explained in terms of knowledge, as a device used by a community of persons for exchanging knowledge by testimony. The book concludes that knowledge is too fundamental to be constituted by something else, such as one's functional or physical state; other things may cause knowledge, but do not constitute it.

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.

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.

This book presents a collection of important new chapters on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the chapters is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably linked to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The chapters, all newly written for this book, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The book includes an introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the chapters in context.

This book is about the philosophy of language. It analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express — what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since it identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, the book's account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. The book argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as ‘Bradley's regress’. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but the book argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.

This book explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics, first being, or what there is, secondly humanity – what makes a human being a human – and thirdly understanding, namely both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. The aim is to juxtapose the evidence available from ethnography and from the study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? This study examines these questions cross‐culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

The Uses of Sense presents a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, concentrating on themes concerning representation, truth, and objectivity. It offers a particular understanding of the radical break Wittgenstein made with what is still the conventional understanding as to what it is for a representation to be true—an understanding manifest in standard treatments of the relation between meaning and truth. On the new view, for any specifiable way things may be represented as being, there are various possible understandings as to what it is for things to be that way; in representing things as that way, one may so represent them on any of these understandings. So it is only where there is a given occasion for representing things in that way that such a representation may bear the sort of understanding that permits engagement with truth. This view of how representation works allowed Wittgenstein a new and fruitful view of scepticism of various forms—metaphysical as well as epistemological. The book sets out in detail what that new view comes to.

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.

Philosophy is by its very nature a critical discipline. Due to its critical nature, all philosophy is progressive, building on the lessons of the past, offering new ways of thinking about the present and the future. Recent debates within analytical philosophy have become very rigorous and fine-tuned, with great attention to detail, resulting in much progress. But social progress, the progress that feminists and other critical philosophers have made or are trying to make toward the goal of “better” knowledge, knowledge that is not only true but relevant for improving our lives, has been for the most part left out of traditional analytical philosophy. The effects of social progress can be tradition-changing at various levels, bringing traditional philosophy “out from the shadows.” The 18 papers (all but two previously unpublished) in this volume, spanning most areas of philosophy, address the social progress being made by analytical feminism in its attempt to bring traditional issues out from the shadows into the light of feminist critique. The volume represents current discussions on topics that have not been previously addressed by feminists, and further discussions on topics that feminists have already addressed but are here themselves critiqued.