Reference, Truth and Reality Essays on the Philosophy of Language

The papers in this collection discuss the central questions about the connections between language, reality and human understanding. The complex relations between accounts of meaning and facts about ordinary speakers’ understanding of their language are examined so as to illuminate the philosophical character of the connections between language and reality. The collection as a whole is a thematically unified treatment of some of the most central questions within contemporary philosophy of language.

1. Introduction Mark Platts 2. Truth and Use Colin McGinn 3. Causal Modalities and Realism Christopher Peacocke 4. Moral Reality and the End of Desire Mark Platts 5. Tarski’s Theory of Truth Hartry Field 6. Physicalism and Prmitive Denotation: Field on Tarski John McDowell 8. On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name John McDowell 9. Truth and Singular Terms Tyler Burge 10. Truth-Theory for Indexical Languages Barry Taylor 11. Operators, Predicates and Truth-Theory Colin McGinn 12. Quotation and Saying That John McDowell 13. What Metaphors Mean Donald Davidson 14. Pronouns, Quantifiers and Relative Clauses (1) Gareth Evans 15. ‘Most’ and ‘All’: Some Comments on a Familiar Programme, and on the Logical Form of Quantified Sentences David Wiggins

Mark Platts