John MacFarlane debates how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative, and how we might use this idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis. Although there is a substantial philosophical literature on relativism about truth, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, this literature (both pro and con) has tended to focus on refutations of the doctrine, or refutations of these refutations, at the expense of saying clearly what the doctrine is. In contrast, Assessment Sensitivity begins with a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth, and uses this view to give satisfying accounts of what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do. The book seeks to provide a richer framework for the description of linguistic practices than standard truth-conditional semantics affords: one that allows not just standard contextual sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context in which an expression is used), but assessment sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context from which a use of an expression is assessed). The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is Francois Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Emma Borg examines the relation between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (features emerging from the context within which such items are being used), and assesses recent answers to the fundamental questions of how and where to draw the divide between the two. In particular, she offers a defence of what is commonly known as 'minimal semantics'. Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, wants to offer a minimal account of the interrelation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive expressions, this is the limit of pragmatic input to semantic content. On all other occasions where context of utterance appears to affect content, the minimalist claims that what it affects is not literal, semantic content but what the speaker conveys by the use of this literal content-it affects what a speaker says but not what a sentence means. As Borg makes clear, the minimalist must allow some contextual influence on semantic content, but her claim is that this influence can be limited to 'tame' pragmatics-the kind of rule-governed appeals to context which won't scare formally minded horses. Pursuing Meaning aims to make good on this claim. The book also contains an overview of all the main positions in the area, clarification of its often complex terminology, and an exploration of key themes such as word meaning, mindreading, and the relationship between semantics and psychology.

This book is a cross-linguistic exploration of semantic and functional change in modal markers. Its approach is broadly functional typological but makes frequent reference to work in formal semantics by scholars such as Angelika Kratzer and Paul Portner. The author starts by considering what modality is and how it relates to and differs from subjectivity. He argues that modality cannot be defined in terms of subjectivity: both concepts are independent of each other, the first exhibiting different degrees of subjectivity, and the second being operative in a much wider range of grammatical and lexical categories. Subjectivity, he suggests, should not be defined solely in terms of performativity, evidentiality, or construal, but rather from the interplay of multiple semantic and pragmatic factors. He then presents a two-dimensional model for the descriptive representation of modality, based on the notion that among the many aspects of modal meaning, volitivity and speech-act-orientation versus event-orientation are two of its most salient parameters. He shows that it is especially the dimension of speech-act orientation versus event-orientation, parallel to category climbing in syntax, that is operative in diachronic change. Numerous examples of diachronic change within modality and between modality and other categories are then examined with respect to their directionality. With a focus on Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese the book is a countercheck to hypotheses built on the Indo-European languages. It also contains numerous illustrations from other languages.

Robert Stalnaker draws together in this volume his seminal work in metaphysics. The central theme is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The book begins with reflections on the general idea of a possible world, and then uses the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify some questions about properties and individuals, reference, thought, and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between questions about what there is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and draws out the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time.

During the last decades, legal theory has focused almost completely on norms, rules and arguments as the constitutive elements of law. Concepts were mostly neglected. The contributions to this volume try to remedy this neglect by elucidating the role concepts play in law from different perspectives. A main aim of this volume is to initiate a debate about concepts in law. Ake Frandberg gives an overview of the many different uses of concepts in law and shows amongst others that concepts in the law should not be confused with the role of concepts in descriptions of the law. Dietmar von der Pfordten criticizes the restriction to norms as parts of the law in contemporary legal theory by questioning what concepts are and what their function is, both in general and in legal conceptual schemes. Giovanni Sartor assumes the inferential analysis of meaning proposed by Alf Ross in his ground breaking paper Tu-tu and addresses the question how possession of a concept, including the rules defining it, is possible without endorsing these rules. Jaap Hage argues that 1. legal status words such as 'owner' have a meaning because they denote things or relations in institutional reality, 2. the meaning of these words consists in this denotation relation, 3. knowledge of this meaning presupposes knowledge of the rules governing these words. Torben Spaak contributes to this volume with an exemplary analysis of one of the most central concepts of the law, namely that of a legal power. Lorenz Kahler discusses the role of concepts in determining the scope of application of legal rules and raises from this perspective the question to what extent legal concept formation can be arbitrary. Ralf Poscher argues that as soon as a concept is used in stating the law, the precise scope of application of this concept has become a legal matter. This means that the use of 'moral' concepts in the law does not automatically lead to a moral import into the law. Dennis Patterson holds that Hart's concept of law can be understood as a so-called 'practice theory' and provides an overview of such a theory."

This collection brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work available in a single volume, readers will gain both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which this interaction is manifest.
The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules.
Together, these three key issues cover a wide range of philosophical interests in law that can be elucidated by a better understanding of language and linguistic communication.

This pioneering book lays new foundations for the study of reference and truth. It seeks to explain the origins and characteristics of human ways of relating to the world by means of an understanding of the inherent structures of the mind. Wolfram Hinzen explores truth in the light of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Truth, he argues, is a function of the human mind and, in particular, likely presupposes the structure of the human clause. Professor Hinzen begins by setting out the essentials of the Minimalist Program and by considering the explanatory role played by the interfaces of the linguistic system with other cognitive systems. He then sets out an internalist reconstruction of meaning. He argues that meaning stems from concepts, originating not from reference but from intentional relations built up in human acts of language in which such concepts figure. How we refer, he suggests, is a function of the concepts we possess, rather than the reverse in which reference to the world gives us the concepts to realize it. He concludes with extended accounts of declarative sentences and names, the two aspects of language which seem most inimical to his approach. The book makes important and radical contributions to theory and debate in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. The author frames his argument in a way that will be readily comprehensible to scholars and advanced students in all three disciplines.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother s unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing D and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes s life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped D as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes s life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.

The first volume of the series Language and Ideology, this work explores mature literacy. Patrick L. Courts argues that while by society's standards many people can read well, they are unable to create meaning from the world of oral and written language. His theory derives from psycho- and sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and whole language theory. Courts criticizes programmed activities, texts, and workbooks--challenging the control that commercial textbook publishers and test-makers exert on education. He shuns overemphasis on methods and offers an alternative approach firmly grounded in theory and aimed at empowering teachers and students. Courts begins with a discussion of liberatory pedagogy, drawing from whole language theory, the social semiotics of Halliday, reader-response theory, and the ideas of Heidegger and Derrida. The subsequent methodological chapters build a case for what Courts calls a conservative revolution in literacy education: teachers combining a sound base of theory with methodologies to tap students' generative, creative powers. Courts's methodology aims to empower people as meaning makers. This book is valuable to teachers and administrators, textbook publishers, and students of education.

This volume presents 50 contributions on the themes of reasonableness and effectiveness and their connections, which are central issues in argumentation theory. It discusses van Eemeren's views on the study of argumentation; the approach to argumentation adopted in pragma-dialectics; pragma-dialectical perspectives on the dialectical and pragmatic dimensions of argumentative discourse; the notion of strategic maneuvering; the pragma-dialectical method of analyzing argumentative discourse; the treatment of fallacies as violations of rules for critical discussion; pragma-dialectical views on context, the role of logic, verbal indicators of argumentative moves and argument schemes; and the process of writing and rewriting argumentative texts. The pragma-dialectical quantitative approach to empirical research on argumentative discourse is illustrated by reporting on selected, illustrative experimental studies, as well as qualitative studies of historical cases.

Paul Grice (1913-1988) is best known for his psychological account of meaning, and for his theory of conversational implicature, although these form only part of a large and diverse body of work. This is the first book to consider Grice's work as a whole. Drawing on the range of his published writing, and also on unpublished manuscripts, lectures and notes, Siobhan Chapman discusses the development of Grice's ideas and relates his work to the major events of his intellectual and professional life.

The goal of inquiry is to acquire knowledge of truths about the world. In this book, Jason Stanley argues that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing a truth about the world. When you learned how to swim, what happened is that you learned some truths about swimming. Knowledge of these truths is what gave you knowledge of how to swim. Something similar occurred with every other activity that you now know how to do, such as riding a bicycle or cooking a meal. Of course, when you learned how to swim, you didn't learn just any truth about swimming. You learned a special kind of truth about swimming, one that answers the question, "How could you swim?" Know How develops an account of the kinds of answers to questions, knowledge of which explains skilled action. Drawing on work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, action theory, philosophy of language, linguistic semantics, and cognitive neuroscience, Stanley presents a powerful case that it is our success as inquirers that explains our capacity for skillful engagement with the world.

Human language is not arbitrary. But how is its use constrained? Are there rules or general human dispositions that govern it? "Rules and Dispositions in Language Use" explains how correct language use is indeed governed by both rules and general human dispositions. It does so by bringing together themes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky, which for many years have been thought to be incompatible.
Opening with a fresh discussion of Saul Kripke's work on rule-following and meaning, the question of what objectively correct language use could amount to is raised and answered. In its conclusion, the importance of human biological endowment for language use is discussed and compared with Wittgensteinian views on how rules govern language use.

This work introduces the concept of the Voice of the Other and the intersubjective world it creates for humans. The unconscious processes of speech and language are deeply identified with the ego. In the movement from nature to civilization, the newborn is mastered by language and becomes part of the social world of his parents. The child's thought is now structured by parental language and speech as well as by memories stored in the unconscious. What is real for the individual is composed only of the images and words that define them. Even family and school relationships are structured in language and the social formations that language created in the past. The imaginary and symbolic functions of the mind form ideologies that bind people together and help them to make sense of their world. In schools this leads to submissive students and constant teacher-student conflict.

The author uses the works of Freud, Lacan, and Marx to situate schooling in capitalist society. He employs psychoanalytic, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives in an attempt to discover how we think and communicate with one another using unconscious processes.

The articles in this volume reflect upon the intersections of corporeity and affectivity in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. They illuminate the meaning of his phenomenology regarding corporeity and affectivity from various phenomenological perspectives. Corporeity and Affectivity explores his invaluable contribution in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary respect, including the humanities, the arts and the sciences. Contributors include: Alexei Chernyakov (), Jagna Brudzinska, Universitat Koeln, IFiS PAN Warschau, Nicola Zippel, Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Philosophy, Karel Novotny, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University of Prague, James Mensch, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities, Annabelle Dufourcq, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Humanities, Juho Hotanen, University of Helsinki, Silvia Stoller, Universitat Wien, Pierre Rodrigo, Universite de Bourgogne, Dijon, Antonino Firenze, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Shaun Gallagher, University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy, Kwok-ying Lau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Monika Murawska, The Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Irene Breuer, Bergische Universitat Wuppertal, Mauro Carbone, Universite "Jean Moulin" Lyon 3, Faculte de philosophie, Laszlo Tengelyi, Bergische Universitat Wuppertal, Bjoern Thorsteinsson, University of Oceland, Institute of Philosophy, Mikkel B. Tin, Telemark University College, Porsgrunn, Tamas Ullmann, ELTE University of Budapest, Institute of Philosophy, Johann P. Arnason, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, Prague, Michael Staudigl, Vienna University, Department of Philosophy, Suzi Adams, Flinders University, Adelaide

Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth-neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context.

Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives.

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In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce's most important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The manuscripts from 1895-1913, with many of them being published here for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic. This first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical development, theory and application of Peirce's graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning and mind.

This book addresses one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and mind, the Poverty of the Stimulus. Presented by Chomsky in 1968, the argument holds that children do not receive enough evidence to infer the existence of core aspects of language, such as the dependence of linguistic rules on hierarchical phrase structure. The argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition and supports the conclusion that knowledge of some aspects of grammar must be innate. In the first part of Rich Grammars from Poor Inputs, contributors consider the general issues around the POS argument, review the empirical data, and offer new and plausible explanations. This is followed by a discussion of the the processes of language acquisition, and observed 'gaps' between adult and child grammar, concentrating on the late spontaneous acquisition by children of some key syntactic principles, basically, though not exclusively, between the ages of 5 to 9. Part 3 widens the horizon beyond language acquisition in the narrow sense, examining the natural development of reading and writing and of the child's growing sensitivity for the fine arts.

Is it possible to quantify over absolutely all there is? Or must all of our quantifiers range over a less-than-all-inclusive domain? It has commonly been thought that the question of absolute generality is intimately connected with the set-theoretic antinomies. But the topic of absolute generality has enjoyed a surge of interest in recent years. It has become increasingly apparent that its ramifications extend well beyond the foundations of set theory. Connections include semantic indeterminacy, logical consequence, higher-order languages, and metaphysics. Rayo and Uzquiano present for the first time a collection of essays on absolute generality. These newly commissioned articles - written by an impressive array of international scholars - draw the reader into the forefront of contemporary research on the subject. The volume represents a variety of approaches to the problem, with some of the contributions arguing for the possibility of all-inclusive quantification and some of them arguing against it. An introduction by the editors draws a helpful map of the philosophical terrain.

Since the pioneering work of Donald Davidson on action, many philosophers have taken critical stances on his causal account. This book criticizes Davidson's event-causal view of action, and offers instead an agent causal view both to describe what an action is and to set a framework for how actions are explained.

Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Understanding plaintive language, however, is often prevented by the resentment and fear it evokes. Lamenting and complaining seems pointless, irreconcilable, and destructive. Language of Ruin and Consumption examines Freud's approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guidelines for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older--ritual, dramatic, and juridical--forms in Rilke, Wittgenstein, Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka puts plaintive language in the center of modern individuality and expounds a fundamental dimension of language neglected in theory: reciprocity is at issue in plaintive language. Language of Ruin and Consumption advocates that a fruitful reception of psychoanalysis in criticism combines the discussion of psychoanalytical concepts with an adaptation of the hermeneutical principle ignored in most philosophical approaches to language, or relegated to mere rhetoric: speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to someone.

In the course of conversation, we exert implicit pressures on both ourselves and others. These forms of conversational pressure are many and far from uniform, so much so that it is unclear whether they constitute a single cohesive class. In this book Sanford C. Goldberg explores the source, nature, and scope of the normative expectations we have of one another as we engage in conversation that are generated by the performance of speech acts themselves. In doing so he examines two fundamental types of expectation - epistemic and interpersonal. It is through normative expectations of these types that we aim to hold one another to standards of proper conversational conduct. This line of argument is pursued in connection with such topics as the normative significance of acts of address, the epistemic costs of politeness, the bearing of epistemic injustice on the epistemology of testimony, the normative pressure friendship exerts on belief, the nature of epistemic trust, the significance of conversational silence, and the various evils of silencing. By approaching these matters in terms of the normative expectations to which conversational participants are entitled, Goldberg aims to offer a unified account of the various pressures that are exerted in the course of a speech exchange.

In this multi-disciplinary volume, comprising the work of several established scholars from different countries, central concepts associated with the work of the Bakhtin Circle are interrogated in relation to intellectual history, language theory and an understanding of new media. The book will prove an important resource for those interested in the ideas of the Bakhtin Circle, but also for those attempting to develop a coherent theoretical approach to language in use and problems of meaning production in new media.

In this book Eli Hirsch identifies and explores a `new' philosophical problem. Hirsch calls this new problem `the division problem'. This is defined as the problem of explaining why our language divides up reality in one way rather than another, or what the rational basis is for our language to contain certain kinds of general words rather than others. Hirsch shows that a language can be constructed which describes reality in ways we would find absurdly irrational, for example by classifying normally disparate items under the same general term. Having demonstrated that this newly identified problem is in fact a serious one which cannot be easily solved or brushed aside, Hirsch offers his own suggestions for a possible solution.

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.