Abstract

Writing from a liberal Marxist point of view, Schaff admits that Marxists have failed, thus far, to face the challenges of contemporary scientific semantics. He explores a wide spectrum of problems concerning the philosophy of language and exhibits a sophisticated knowledge of the works of Husserl, Peirce, Russell, Wittgenstein, Dewey and others. His approach is dialectical in so far as he attempts to reach his own position through the criticism of others. Nevertheless, his criticism is too frequently extremely superficial. Though much of what Schaff says concerning the social context of human communication is only programmatic, the striking feature of this study is not the differences but the similarities of his Marxist approach and the results of recent non-Marxist investigations of semantics.--R. J. B.