Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an...

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern....

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic. Philosophers of language and epistemologists join forces to elucidate what kind of speech act assertion is, particularly in light of relativist views of truth, and how assertion is governed by epistemic norms.

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about...

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the...

When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. The Inessential Indexical is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. Cappelen and Dever oppose one of the most entrenched and dominant trends in contemporary philosophy: that perspective (and the perspective of the first person in particular) is...

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about...

When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. The Inessential Indexical is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. Cappelen and Dever oppose one of the most entrenched and dominant trends in contemporary philosophy: that perspective (and the perspective of the first person in particular) is...

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the...

Context and Communication offers an introduction to a central theme in the study of language: the various ways in which what we say (or ask, or think) depends on the context of speech and thought. The period since 1970 has produced a vast literature on this topic, both by philosophers and by linguists. It is one of the areas of philosophy (and linguistics) where most progress has been made over the last few decades. This book explores some of the central data, questions, concepts, and theories of context sensitivity. It is written to be accessible to someone with no prior knowledge...