In this book, Scott Soames illuminates the notion of truth and the role it plays in our ordinary thought as well as in our logical, philosophical, and scientific theories. Soames aims to integrate and deepen the most significant insights on truth from a variety of sources. He powerfully brings together the best technical work and the most important philosophical reflection on truth and shows how each can illuminate the other. Investigating such questions as whether we need a truth (...) predicate at all, what theoretical tasks it allows us to accomplish, and how we are to understand the content of any predicate capable of accomplishing these tasks, Soames organizes his discussion into three parts. Part I addresses crucial foundational issues as it identifies the bearers of truth, provides a basis for distinguishing truth from other notions, and formulates positive responses to well-known forms of truth-skepticism. Part II explicates the formal theories of Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke and evaluates the philosophical significance of their work. It discusses their treatments of the Liar paradox, the relationship between truth and proof, the notion of a partially defined predicate, the concepts of logical truth and logical consequence, and the connection between truth and meaning. Part III extends important lessons drawn from Tarski and Kripke into new domains: vague predicates, the Sorites paradox, and the development of a larger, deflationary perspective on truth. Throughout the book, Soames examines a wide range of deflationary theories of truth, and attempts to separate what is correct and worth preserving in them from what is not. In doing so, he seeks to clear up many of the most significant philosophical doubts about truth. Written for a general audience while offering engaging material to the specialist, this rich study will be profitably read by both. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews REPLY TO PINCOCK S S Philosophy / U. of Southern California Los Angeles,  -,  @. write to correct errors in Christopher Pincock’s review of my discussion of IRussell. First, according to Pincock, I attempt to “undermine Moore’s views on ethics in Part One, [and] Russell’s conception of analysis in Part Two” by charging them with a pre-Kripkean (...) conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity. Not so. Although I do show that such conflation had negative consequences for the views of several philosophers, Moore and Russell are not among them. Moore’s error—which marred the defence of his thesis that conclusions about goodness are never consequences of purely descriptive premisses —was in tacitly assuming that all necessary/a priori relations among concepts arise from definitions (see my : –). A similar problem occurs in Russell, but only tangentially in connection with one possible route to his problematic principle () in Our Knowledge of the External World, the critique of which was not a part of any attack on his general conception of analysis (: –). () If the occurrence of sense-data constitutes verification of S, then S must be (at least partly) about sense-data.  Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. : The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton: Princeton U. P., ), pp. –.  Russell, n.s.  (winter –): – (at ).  Except when otherwise indicated, all references to OKEW will be to the revised,  Allen and Unwin edition. Although this was the edition I used in writing my chapter on OKEW, my bibliographical citation was a confused amalgam of different editions. The work was originally published in  by Open Court; there was a second printing in ; and in  Allen and Unwin re-issued it by purchasing extra sheets of the  printing, and binding them. In , Russell revised the work, which Allen and Unwin then published as a revised edition. That edition is identical to the Routledge paperback edition now in print and used by students. (Russell revised the  edition again for Norton’s  edition, which was reset for the Mentor paperback.) Except at one point, which I will identify later, the difference between the  and the  editions doesn’t affect my dispute with Pincock. Thanks to the editor, Kenneth Blackwell, for kindly sharing his extensive knowledge of the bibliographical history with me, and to Ross Scimeca, the head librarian at the incomparable Hoose Philosophy Library at , for furnishing me with copies of the editions I needed to sort this out. _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  Evidently, Pincock has confused the error about definition, which I expose, with a pre-Kripkean conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity, which is not mentioned in Parts One and Two. This is a blunder. The advances in our understanding of crucial logical, semantic, epistemological, and modal notions which I identify as paramount achievements of the analytic tradition are not limited to those made by Kripke. To suggest otherwise is a distortion. Second, Pincock errs when he objects that in citing () as a source for the view that sense-data statements give the content of material-object statements, I ascribe “some form of latent verificationism” to Russell. If the objection is that Russell was no verificationist—since he didn’t hold that S is meaningful only if S is verifiable—the reply is that I never suggested otherwise. What I said is that () together with () Verification always consists in the occurrence of sense-data constituted a historical precursor to verificationism (: ). Perhaps, then, Pincock objects to my reconstruction of Russell’s argument: since (i) truths of physics and common sense are known by being verified, (ii) it follows from () and () that our knowledge of them is knowledge of sense-data. Perhaps, Pincock thinks that Russell would reject (i). Citing Russell … if there is any knowledge of general truths at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is independent of empirical evidence, i.e. does not depend upon the data of sense. (OKEW, pp. –; OKEW, p. ) Pincock concludes that scientific knowledge, for Russell, is justified partly by sense-data, and partly by associated logical principles about relations... (shrink)

My goal in writing 'Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century' was to identify and explain the most important achievements of analytic philosophy which every student of the subject should be aware of, as well as those of its failures from which we have the most to learn. I attempted to do this by constructing a history that was itself a piece of analytic philosophy in its emphasis on analysis, reconstruction and criticism of arguments. In rebutting Hacker's critique of it, I (...) explain how my goal shaped my selection of topics, with special reference to the ordinary language period. I correct his misrepresentations of my treatment of the philosophers of this period, I demonstrate his failure to grasp, or understand the significance of, the Kripkean necessary a posteriori, and I reveal the misconceptions in his criticism of my interpretation of the 'Tractatus'. (shrink)

The tradition descending from Frege and Russell has typically treated theories of meaning either as theories of meanings, or as theories of truth conditions. However, propositions of the classical sort don't exist, and truth conditions can't provide all the information required by a theory of meaning. In this book, one of the world's leading philosophers of language offers a way out of this dilemma. Traditionally conceived, propositions are denizens of a "third realm" beyond mind and matter, "grasped" by mysterious Platonic (...) intuition. As conceived here, they are cognitive-event types in which agents predicate properties and relations of things--in using language, in perception, and in nonlinguistic thought. Because of this, one's acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions is acquaintance with, and knowledge of, events of one's cognitive life. This view also solves the problem of "the unity of the proposition" by explaining how propositions can be genuinely representational, and therefore bearers of truth. The problem, in the traditional conception, is that sentences, utterances, and mental states are representational because of the relations they bear to inherently representational Platonic complexes of universals and particulars. Since we have no way of understanding how such structures can be representational, independent of interpretations placed on them by agents, the problem is unsolvable when so conceived. However, when propositions are taken to be cognitive-event types, the order of explanation is reversed and a natural solution emerges. Propositions are representational because they are constitutively related to inherently representational cognitive acts. Strikingly original, What Is Meaning? is a major advance. (shrink)

volume 1. The founding giants -- volume 2. A new vision -- volume 3. The struggle for modality.

Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century by Scott Soames reminds me of nothing so much as Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Both are works that arose immediately out of the needs of undergraduate teaching, yet each manages to say much of significance to knowledgeable professionals. Each indirectly provides an outline of the history of its field, through a presentation of selected major works, taken in chronological order and including items that are generally recognized as marking decisive turning points. (...) Yet neither Soames’s work nor Nabokov’s is a history in any conventional sense, both being immediately disqualified from that category by the general absence of coverage of minor and middling works and writers. The emphasis is pedagogical rather than historiographical: the emphasis is on introducing the student to the field through very close examination of the limited number of key texts selected for inclusion. (shrink)

Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.

By the early 1970s, and continuing through 2001, David Lewis and Saul Kripke had taken over W.V.O. Quine’s leadership in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic in the English-speaking world. Quine, in turn, had inherited his position in the early 1950s from Rudolf Carnap, who had been the leading logical positivist -- first in Europe, and, after 1935, in America. A renegade positivist himself, Quine eschewed apriority, necessity, and analyticity, while (for a time) adopting a holistic version of (...) verificationism. Like Carnap, he placed philosophical logic and the philosophy of science at the center of philosophy. (shrink)

In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances. He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true.

A theory of higher-order vagueness for partially-defined, context-sensitive predicates like is blue is offered. According to the theory, the predicate is determinately blue means roughly is an object o such that the claim that o is blue is a necessary consequence of the rules of the language plus the underlying non-linguistic facts in the world. Because the question of which rules count as rules of the language is itself vague, the predicate is determinately blue is both vague and partial in (...) a sense analogous (though not completely identical) to the sense in which is blue is vague and partial. However, higher-order vagueness stops there. Although the anti-extension of is determinately blue differs from that of is blue, further iterations of determinately have no semantic effect. The paper closes with a discussion of the need to posit sharp and precise lines dividing the range of potential application of a vague predicate into semantically distinct categories. It is argued that this is less of a problem for the present theory than for many others, because the categories into which the range is divided by the present theory -- like the category of counting as blue because the rules of the language offer speakers no discretion, as opposed to the category of counting as blue because speakers have invoked an absolute minimum of discretion in adjusting the contextually sensitive boundaries of the predicate -- are not those that the linguistic competence of ordinary speakers equips them to make highly accurate and reliable judgments about. (shrink)

The paper reviews the central components of the cognitive theory of propositions and explains both its empirical advantages for theories of language and mind and its foundational metaphysical and epistemological advantages over other theories. It then answers a leading objection to the theory, before closing by raising the issue of how questions, which are the contents of interrogative sentences, and directives, which are the contents of imperative sentences, are related to propositions.

In this collection of recent and unpublished essays, leading analytic philosopher Scott Soames traces milestones in his field from its beginnings in Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through its subsequent growth in the United States, up to its present as the world's most vigorous philosophical tradition. The central essay chronicles how analytic philosophy developed in the United States out of American pragmatism, the impact of European visitors and immigrants, the midcentury transformation of the (...) Harvard philosophy department, and the rapid spread of the analytic approach that followed. Another essay explains the methodology guiding analytic philosophy, from the logicism of Frege and Russell through Wittgenstein's linguistic turn and Carnap's vision of replacing metaphysics with philosophy of science. Further essays review advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics that laid the foundation for a rigorous, scientific study of language, meaning, and information. Other essays discuss W.V.O. Quine, David K. Lewis, Saul Kripke, the Frege-Russell analysis of quantification, Russell's attempt to eliminate sets with his "no class theory," and the Quine-Carnap dispute over meaning and ontology. The collection then turns to topics at the frontier of philosophy of language. The final essays, combining philosophy of language and law, advance a sophisticated originalist theory of interpretation and apply it to U.S. constitutional rulings about due process. (shrink)

Quine was born on June 25, 1908 in Akron Ohio. From 1926 to 1930 he attended Oberlin College, from which he graduated with a B.A. in mathematics that included reading in mathematical philosophy. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1932 with a dissertation on Principia Mathematica advised by Whitehead. The next year traveling on fellowship in Europe, where he interacted with Carnap, Tarski, Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz, Schlick, Hahn, Reichenbach, Gödel, and Ayer. He was back in Cambridge between 1933 and 1936 (...) as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society. In 1936, he joined the Harvard faculty, where he remained for 42 years, except for 3 years in the Navy in World War II. Returning after the war, he was promoted to Professor in 1948. Although he retired in 1978, he retained his office and remained active through much of the 1990s. Quine died on Christmas Day 2000. (shrink)

In this book, Scott Soames defends the revolution in philosophy led by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan against attack from those wishing to revive ..

In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the (...) sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it. He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

A renegade positivist himself, Quine eschewed apriority, necessity, and analyticity, while (for a time) adopting a holistic version of verificationism. Despite similarities in their opposition to Quine, the differences between Lewis and Kripke were large ‐ especially in the semantics and metaphysics of modality. They also had different philosophical styles. Lewis's (1970b) was one of the cutting‐edge texts of its time ‐ along with work by Richard Montague, David Kaplan, and Robert Stalnaker. Together, they laid out a powerful framework for (...) the use of intensional logic in semantic theories of natural language. Lewis was, of course, the author of many more influential articles in the philosophy of language. A final one that must be mentioned is Lewis (1975a). In it, he argues that sentence adverbs such as ′always′, ′usually′, ′often′, sometimes′, and ′never′ are unselective quantifiers that bind all free variables in their scope. (shrink)

The concept of a proposition is important in several areas of philosophy and central to the philosophy of language. This collection of readings investigates many different philosophical issues concerning the nature of propositions and the ways they have been regarded through the years. Reflecting both the history of the topic and the range of contemporary views, the book includes articles from Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, the Russell-Frege Correspondence, Alonzo Church, David Kaplan, John Perry, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Mark Richard, Scott (...) Soames, and Nathan Salmon. (shrink)

A reply to Quentin Smith's argument (abstracted in this section; 9607133) that important ideas of the "new theory of reference" do not emanate from the work of Saul Kripke, as is commonly assumed, but from an article by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961). In an analysis of the historical records, Smith's claims are found to be false. It is argued that Marcus's papers do not concern natural language & do not contain defenses of proper names. Kripke's role, unlike that of Marcus, (...) is claimed to be central in the elaboration of the theory of reference. (shrink)

His first point is that true exhibits pathologies that smidget doesn’t. If smidget is undefined for Charlie, then the sentence Charlie is a smidget is undefined, and there is no basis for accepting either it or its negation. There is no pathology here; it is simply a case in which a sentence and its negation must both be rejected. With smidget there is no paradoxicality analogous to Liar sentences and no circularity corresponding to Truth Tellers. Gupta concludes that true and (...) smidget must be very different. (shrink)

Quine and Kripke's Wittgenstein both present “skeptical” arguments for the conclusion that there are no facts about meaning. In each case the argument for the conclusion is that if there are facts about meaning, then they must be determined by some more fundamental facts, but facts about meaning are not determined by any such facts. Consequently there are no facts about meanings. Within this overall framework, Quine and Kripke's Wittgenstein differ substantially — both in their reasons for thinking that facts (...) about meaning are not determined by other facts, and in their responses to the alleged elimination of these facts. Despite this, I believe that their arguments fail for essentially the same reason; each equivocates about what it means for one set of facts to determine another. Once the equivocation is eliminated, the arguments lose their plausibility. (shrink)

Linsky’s central point is correct; Kripke’s distinction between rigid and nonrigid designators can be extended in a straightforward way from singular terms to general terms. In both cases, for an expression to rigidly designate its extension is for it to designate the same extension with respect to every possible world-state (in which it has an extension at all). On this account, simple natural kind terms like water, gold, electricity, blue, and tiger – as well as ordinary general terms like bachelor, (...) philosopher, automobile and triangle – designate the same extension with respect to each world-state. As I see it, however, the two differ importantly in the metaphysics of their designata. Whereas a term like bachelor designates a property that may be distinguished from other properties that are necessarily coextensive with it, natural kinds differ from one another only if there are possible world-states in which some of their instances are different. Intuitively this seems plausible; it is hard to imagine two distinct species of animal, two distinct substances, or two distinct colors which have precisely the same instances in every possible world-state. This is important for my linguistic model. Consider, for example, the color blue (which I take to be a natural kind). Color science tells us that the object-color blue is determined.. (shrink)

No semantic theory satisfying certain natural constraints can identify the semantic contents of sentences (the propositions they express), with sets of circumstances in which the sentences are true–no matter how fine-grained the circumstances are taken to be. An objection to the proof is shown to fail by virtue of conflating model-theoretic consequence between sentences with truth-conditional consequence between the semantic contents of sentences. The error underlines the impotence of distinguishing semantics, in the sense of a truth-based theory of logical consequence, (...) and semantics, in the sense of a theory of meaning. (shrink)

In this book one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field--its principal achievements, its most pressing current questions, and its most promising future directions. In addition to explaining the progress philosophers have made toward creating a theoretical framework for the study of language, Scott Soames investigates foundational concepts--such as truth, reference, and meaning--that are central to the philosophy of language and important to philosophy as a whole. The first part of the book (...) describes how philosophers from Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Carnap to Kripke, Kaplan, and Montague developed precise techniques for understanding the languages of logic and mathematics, and how these techniques have been refined and extended to the study of natural human languages. The book then builds on this account, exploring new thinking about propositions, possibility, and the relationship between meaning, assertion, and other aspects of language use. An invaluable overview of the philosophy of language by one of its most important practitioners, this book will be essential reading for all serious students of philosophy. (shrink)