W. V. Quine (1908–2000) was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. Quine is also famous for the view that epistemology should be naturalized, that is conducted in a scientific spirit with the object of investigating the relationship between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief. The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of Quine's philosophy: the underdetermination of physical theory, analycity, naturalism, propositional attitudes, behaviorism, reference and ontology, positivism, holism and logic.

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities.

According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents (such as truth-conditions) to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. Francois Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' (as opposed to merely implied) determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

This book examines John Locke’s claims about the nature and workings of language. Walter Ott proposes a new interpretation of Locke’s thesis that words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication. He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke’s metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledge, and mental representation. His discussion, which is the first book-length treatment of its topic, challenges many of the current orthodox readings of Locke, and will be of interest to historians of philosophy and philosophers of language alike.

What is it to understand another person? A popular view in philosophy of mind, cognitive science and various other disciplines is that interpersonal understanding is a matter ofemploying a 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, consisting primarily of an ability to attribute internal propositional attitudes on the basis of behavioural observations. The emphasis of recent debates has been on which mechanisms enable us to do this, how they arise during development and how they might have evolved, rather than on whether we actually do it at all. Ratcliffe disputes the shared premise on which these debates rest. He argues that 'folk psychology', as generally described, is a theoretically motivated, simplistic and misleading abstraction from social life, which is wrongly asserted to be 'commonsense' or 'what the folk think'. Drawing on phenomenology, neuroscience and development psychology, he offers an alternative account of interpersonal understanding. This account emphasizes a distinctive kind of bodily relatedness between people and the extent to which interpersonal interactions are regulated by shared social environments.

This work is the fullest treatment yet of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience. According to Melnyk, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. In the two concluding chapters he asserts in unprecedented detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in an exceptionally clear style, this book will appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology--that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its parts. Using Plato's Meno as a starting point, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that it is less valuable than generally assumed. The book will appeal to students and professional philosophers in epistemology.

"In this book, Frederic Schick extends and applies the decision theory he proposed in two previous Cambridge books: Understanding Action (1991) and Making Choices (1997). He shows how the way we see situations affects the choices we make, and he develops a logic of thought responsive to how things are seen. The book considers many questions of choosing and some familiar human predicaments. Why do people in choice experiments act so often against expectations? How might they and the experimenters be looking at different problems in them? Why do people cooperate so often where the textbook logic excludes that? How can there be weakness of will - and must it always be faulted? Does how we see things affect what they mean, and what are people reporting who say that their lives have no meaning for them? These very different questions turn out to have some closely related answers. There are vivid discussions here of cases drawn from many sources. The book will interest all who study how we choose and act, whether they are philosophers, psychologists, or economists - or any combination." Frederic Schick is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

"In this book, Frederic Schick extends and applies the decision theory he proposed in two previous Cambridge books: Understanding Action (1991) and Making Choices (1997). He shows how the way we see situations affects the choices we make, and he develops a logic of thought responsive to how things are seen. The book considers many questions of choosing and some familiar human predicaments. Why do people in choice experiments act so often against expectations? How might they and the experimenters be looking at different problems in them? Why do people cooperate so often where the textbook logic excludes that? How can there be weakness of will - and must it always be faulted? Does how we see things affect what they mean, and what are people reporting who say that their lives have no meaning for them? These very different questions turn out to have some closely related answers. There are vivid discussions here of cases drawn from many sources. The book will interest all who study how we choose and act, whether they are philosophers, psychologists, or economists - or any combination." Frederic Schick is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

Jane Heal argues that central to our ability to arrive at views about others' thoughts is not knowledge of some theory of the mind but rather an ability to imagine alternative worlds and how things appear from another person's point of view. She then applies this view to questions of how we represent others' thoughts, the shape of psychological concepts, the nature of rationality and the possibility of first person authority. This book is of interest to students and professionals in philosophy of mind and language.

First published in 1973, Rules and Meanings is an anthology of works that form part of Mary Douglas' struggle to devise an anthropological modernism conducive to her opposition to reputedly modernizing trends in contemporary society. The collection contains works by Wittgenstein, Schutz, Husserl, Hertz and other continentals. The underlying themes of the anthology are the construction of meaning, the force of hidden background assumptions, tacit conventions and the power of spatial organization to reinforce words. The work serves to complement the philosophers' work on everyday language with the anthropologists' theory of everyday knowledge.

This classic collection of essays, first published in 1968, has had an enduring impact on academic and public debates about criminal responsibility and criminal punishment. Forty years on, its arguments are as powerful as ever. H.L.A. Hart offers an alternative to retributive thinking about criminal punishment that nevertheless preserves the central distinction between guilt and innocence. He also provides an account of criminal responsibility that links the distinction between guilt and innocence closely to the ideal of the rule of law, and thereby attempts to by-pass unnerving debates about free will and determinism. Always engaged with live issues of law and public policy, Hart makes difficult philosophical puzzles accessible and immediate to a wide range of readers.
For this new edition, otherwise a reproduction of the original, John Gardner adds an introduction engaging critically with Hart's arguments, and explaining the continuing importance of Hart's ideas in spite of the intervening revival of retributive thinking in both academic and policy circles.
Unavailable for ten years, the new edition of Punishment and Responsibility makes available again the central text in the field for a new generation of academics, students and professionals engaged in criminal justice and penal policy.

There is an important family of semantic notions that are applied to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts--as when one says that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Christopher Hill presents a theory of the content of such notions. That theory is largely deflationary in spirit. It represents a broad range of semantic notions free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. He also explains the relationship of mirroring or semantic correspondence linking thoughts to reality.

This book provides the only detailed, systematic reconsideration of the neglected nineteenth-century positivist Auguste Comte currently available. Apart from offering an accurate account of what Comte actually wrote, the book argues that Comte's positivism has never had greater contemporary relevance than now. Providing a lucid exposition of Comte and informed by considerable new scholarship on his work, this book will be valuable to philosophers, especially philosophers of science, a wide range of intellectual historians, and to historians of science and psychology.

A long tradition, going back to Aristotle, conceives of logic in terms of necessity and possibility: a deductive argument is correct if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when the premises are true. A relatively unknown feature of the analytic tradition in philosophy is that, at its very inception, this venerable conception of the relation between logic and necessity and possibility - the concepts of modality - was put into question. The founders of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, held that these concepts are empty: there are no genuine distinctions among the necessary, the possible, and the actual. In this book, the first of two volumes, Sanford Shieh investigates the grounds of this position and its consequences for Frege's and Russell's conceptions of logic. The grounds lie in doctrines on truth, thought, and knowledge, as well as on the relation between mind and reality, that are central to the philosophies of Frege and Russell, and are of enduring philosophical interest. The upshot of this opposition to modality is that logic is fundamental, and, to be coherent, modal concepts would have to be reconstructed in logical terms. This rejection of modality in early analytic philosophy remains of contemporary significance, though the coherence of modal concepts is rarely questioned nowadays because it is generally assumed that suspicion of modality derives from logical positivism, which has not survived philosophical scrutiny. The anti-modal arguments of Frege and Russell, however, have nothing to do with positivism and remain a challenge to the contemporary acceptance of modal notions.

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

Gilboa and Schmeidler provide a new paradigm for modeling decision making under uncertainty. Case-based decision theory suggests that people make decisions by analogies to past cases: they tend to choose acts that performed well in the past in similar situations, and to avoid acts that performed poorly. The authors describe the general theory and its relationship to planning, repeated choice problems, inductive inference, and learning. They highlight its mathematical and philosophical foundations and compare it to expected utility theory as well as to rule-based systems.

Scientific concepts, laws, theories and models are representations but are uniquely different. This book explores each within an original, philosophical framework rooted in the Kantian tradition. Through a revisionist historical approach, it shows how this tradition helps us rethink contemporary issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

Some of the people who knew Stanley Cavell best--or know his work most intimately--are gathered in Inheriting Stanley Cavell to lend critical insight into the once and future legacy of this American titan of thought. Former students, colleagues, long-time friends, as well as distant admirers, explore moments when their personal experiences of Cavell's singular philosophical and literary illuminations have, as he put it, "risen to the level of philosophical significance." Many of the memories, dreams, and reflections on offer in this volume carry with them a welcome register of the autobiographical, expressing--much as Cavell did through his own writing--how the personal can become philosophical and thus provide a robust mode for the making of meaning and the clarifying of the human condition. Here, in varied styles and through a range of dynamic content, authors engage the lingering question of inheriting philosophy in whatever form it might take, and what it means to think about inheritance and enact it.

In the early twentieth century, an apparently obscure philosophical debate took place between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. The outcome was momentous: the demise of British Idealism and the rise of analytic philosophy. Stewart Candlish examines afresh this formative period in twentieth-cenutry thought and comes to some surprising conclusions.

This book argues that it is not obvious what we means by saying our beliefs and assertions are 'truth-directed'. Do we weaken our notion of a belief if we deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism? This book defends a radically new 'ecological' model of knowledge, examining what might happen if we abandoned genuine belief.

This book is a Wittgensteinian study of concept possession and conceptual investigation in philosophy. It offers advanced introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy and original treatment of its most crucial regions. Written as a Socratic dialogue, with a glance to Plato, it makes a bold claim about Wittgenstein's place in Western philosophy.

If you take for granted the widespread assumption of our culture that matter constitutes the totality of reality, this book will challenge that assumption. The pervasive materialist or physicalist presupposition of so much thinking is not scientifically established but is a basic article of naturalistic faith. Professor Hick argues that the widely held belief that consciousness is identical with or a by-product of the functioning of the brain is unsustainable. There is non-physical as well as physical reality. It is entirely possible that there is a divine realm transcending the material universe but encountered in religious experience. He looks carefully at the epistemological implications of this. But Hick also challenges many traditional religious beliefs. He distinguishes between religion as human institutions, which have done as much harm as good in the world, and religion as the inner spiritual response to the Transcendent. Whereas institutional religion has divided humanity, spiritual or mystical experience can unite people of every part of the world.

This book is about the nature of skeptical arguments and their role in philosophical inquiry. John Greco delineates three main theses: that a number of historically prominent skeptical arguments make no obvious mistake, and therefore cannot be easily dismissed; that the analysis of skeptical arguments is philosophically useful and important, and should therefore have a central place in the methodology of philosophy; and that taking skeptical arguments seriously requires us to adopt an externalist, reliabilist epistemology. This book will be of interest to professionals and graduate students in epistemology and moral philosophy.

This book is an important and original contribution to the philosophy of art that bridges the disciplines of philosophy and art. It engages with a long-standing debate about what it is that bestows the designation "art" on an artwork. Tiffany Sutton shows how the history of art should influence the classification of visual art. She considers the various theories that have been put forward to define the nature of the artwork and then offers her own set of classificatory norms.