Read more
This volume draws together four decades of work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis. Topics include the historical background of contemporary philosophical accounts of meaning, sentence structure, definitions, and the nature of truth.
List of contents
- Sources
- Introduction
- 1: Meaning and Truth-Conditions: From Frege's Grand Design to Davidson's
- 2: Concept and Copula
- 3: Donald Davidson's Account of Semantic Interpretation. How Comprehensive Is It? 'All', 'Some', and 'Most'
- 4: Names, Existence, and Contingency
- 5: Modes of Grammatical Combination, Adverbs, and the Case of Action Sentences
- 6: Three Moments in the Theory of Definition or Analysis: Its Possibility, Its Aim or Aims, and Its Limit or Terminus
- 7: Locke: 'The Great Conduit'
- 8: Languages as Things in their Own Right
- 9: Peirce: Reflections on Inquiry and Truth Arising from his Method for the Fixation of Belief
- 10: A Substantivist-cum-Indefinibilist Account of Truth and the Marks of Truth
About the author
David Wiggins was Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford from 1993 until his retirement in 2000. Before that, he was Professor at Bedford College, London; Fellow of University College, Oxford; and Professor at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell, 1967), Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980), Needs, Values, Truth (amended 3rd edition Oxford, 2002), Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2001), Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Penguin, 2006), and Continuants: Their Activity, their Being, and their Identity (Oxford, 2018).
Summary
This volume draws together four decades of work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis. Topics include the historical background of contemporary philosophical accounts of meaning, sentence structure, definitions, and the nature of truth.
