It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors' belief in the permanent im- portance of Quine's philosophy and in the value of the papers com- menting on it which were collected in our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has been brought up to date. The editors cannot claim any credit for this improvement, however. We have not tried to imitate the Library of Living...

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con- tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief,...

In the last 25 years, the concept of information has played a crucial role in communication theory, so much so that the terms information theory and communication theory are sometimes used almost interchangeably. It seems to us, however, that the notion of information is also destined to render valuable services to the student of induction and probability, of learning and reinforcement, of semantic meaning and deductive inference, as well as of scientific method in general. The present volume is an attempt to illustrate some of these uses of information concepts. In 'On Semantic Information'...

The papers and comments published in the present volume represent the proceedings of a research workshop on the grammar and semantics of natural languages held at Stanford University in the fall of 1970. The workshop met first for three days in September and then for a period of two days in November for extended discussion and analysis. The workshop was sponsored by the Committee on Basic Research in Education, which has been funded by the United States Office of Education through a grant to the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council. We...