Philosophical Essays, Volume 1 (ebook)

Argumento de Philosophical Essays, Volume 1 (ebook)

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays.

The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts.

The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics--including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind.

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

"Soames's work is of an exceptionally high quality, the selections made here are truly excellent, and the organization is well thought out. Having these papers available in this form is a great boon to scholars."--Stephen Neale, CUNY Graduate Center

"Since many of these important papers are relatively inaccessible, it is particularly useful to have them collected together, and Soames has done an excellent job of selecting and arranging them. These two volumes are really terrific."--Alex Byrne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology0The Origins of These Essays ix
Introduction 1

Part One: Presupposition 21Essay One: A Projection Problem for Speaker Presuppositions 23
Essay Two: Presupposition 73

Part Two: Language and Linguistic Competence 131
Essay Three: Linguistics and Psychology 133
Essay Four: Semantics and Psychology 159
Essay Five: Semantics and Semantic Competence 182
Essay Six: The Necessity Argument 202
Essay Seven: Truth, Meaning, and Understanding 208
Essay Eight: Truth and Meaning--in Perspective 225

Part Three: Semantics and Pragmatics 249
Essay Nine: Naming and Asserting 251
Essay Ten: The Gap between Meaning and Assertion: Why What We Literally Say Often Differs from What Our Words Literally Mean 278
Essay Eleven: Drawing the Line between Meaning and Implicature--and Relating Both to Assertion 298

Part Four: Descriptions 327
Essay Twelve: Incomplete Definite Descriptions 329
Essay Thirteen: Donnellan?s Referential/Attributive Distinction 360
Essay Fourteen: Why Incomplete Definite Descriptions Do Not Defeat Russell?s Theory of Descriptions 377

Part Five: Meaning and Use: Lessons for Legal Interpretation 401
Essay Fifteen: Interpreting Legal Texts: What Is, and What Is Not, Special about the Law 403
Index 425