Overview

Now in its fourth edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author William G. Lycan structures the book’s thirteen chapters into four general parts. Part I, Reference and referring, includes topics such as Russell’s Theory of Descriptions (and its failings), Donnellan’s distinction, problems of anaphora, the Description Theory of proper names, Searle’s Cluster Theory, and the Causal–Historical Theory. Part II, Theories of meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and speech acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes an introduction to the Relevance approach to pragmatics. Part IV, The expressive and the figurative, examines various forms of expressive language, as well as what “metaphorical meaning” is and how most listeners readily grasp it. Features of Philosophy of Language include: chapter overviews and summaries clear supportive examples study questions annotated lists of further reading a glossary. Key updates to the fourth edition: a new section on the predicativist theory of proper names an expanded section on inferentialist theories of meaning a new section on dynamic (“update”) theories of meaning a separate section on varieties of presupposition an all-new section on “applied” philosophy of language, listing eleven recent areas of research up-to-date coverage of new literature, further reading lists, and the bibliography.

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9781041076131

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Reviews

Praise for the third edition: ""An authoritative, pedagogically sensitive and superbly clear introduction to the central issues of the philosophy of language."" – Paul Boghossian, New York University, USA

Praise for the Third Edition: ""An authoritative, pedagogically sensitive and superbly clear introduction to the central issues of the philosophy of language."" -- Paul Boghossian, New York University, USA

Author Information

William G. Lycan is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is author of Logical Form in Natural Language (1984), Knowing Who (with Steven Boër, 1986), Consciousness (1987), Judgement and Justification (1988), Modality and Meaning (1994), Consciousness and Experience (1996), Real Conditionals (2001), On Evidence in Philosophy (2019), and Perceptual Content (2024).

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