In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of the debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality--the pictures of rationality on which the debate centers--and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowledge--in other...

A detailed revision and refinement of the "semantic theory of metaphor," this book provides a comprehensive philosophical theory explicating metaphor's cognitive contribution. According to the author, metaphor effects a transference of meaning, not between two terms, but between two structured domains of content, or "semantic fields." Semantic fields, construed as necessary to a theory of word-meaning, provide the contrastive and affinitive relations that govern a term's literal use. In a metaphoric use, these relations are projected into a second domain which is thereby reordered with...

In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

This book expounds and defends a new conception of the relation between truth and meaning. Atlas argues that the sense of a sense-general sentence radically underdetermines (independently of indexicality) its truth-conditional content. He applies this linguistic analysis to illuminate old and new philosophical problems of meaning, truth, falsity, negation, existence, presupposition, and implicature. In particular, he demonstrates how the concept of ambiguity has been misused and confused with other concepts of meaning, and how the interface between semantics and pragmatics has been...

Storrs McCall presents an original philosophical theory of the nature of the universe based on a striking new model of its space-time structure and argues that the fact that the model throws light on such a large number of problems constitutes strong evidence that the universe is as the model portrays it. An ambitious, controversial, and ingenious idea for a completely new metaphysical foundation for philosophy and physics, this book discusses a broad range of topics within the framework of the new theory, and will be of special interest to physicists for its original new interpretation of...