Philosophical Essays, Volume 2 (ebook)

Argumento de Philosophical Essays, Volume 2 (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: Reference, Propositions, and Propositional Attitudes 31
Essay One: Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content 33
Essay Two: Why Propositions Can't Be Sets of Truth-Supporting Circumstances 72
Essay Three: Belief and Mental Representation 81
Essay Four: Attitudes and Anaphora 111

Part Two: Modality 137
Essay Five: The Modal Argument: Wide Scope and Rigidified Descriptions 139
Essay Six: The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary A Posteriori 165
Essay Seven: Knowledge of Manifest Natural Kinds 189
Essay Eight: Understanding Assertion 211
Essay Nine: Ambitious Two-Dimensionalism 243
Essay Ten: Actually 277

Part Three: Truth and Vagueness 301
Essay Eleven: What Is a Theory of Truth? 303
Essay Twelve: Understanding Deflationism 323
Essay Thirteen: Higher-Order Vagueness for Partially Defined Predicates 340
Essay Fourteen: The Possibility of Partial Definition 362

Part Four: Kripke, Wittgenstein, and Following a Rule 383
Essay Fifteen: Skepticism about Meaning: Indeterminacy, Normativity, and the Rule-Following Paradox 385
Essay Sixteen: Facts, Truth Conditions, and the Skeptical Solution to the Rule-Following Paradox 416

Index 457