Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics

Rating:
Summary: Essential readings in the Philosophy of Language
Review: This collection of papers was first published in 1976. It represents some of the best work on both Donald Davidson's suggestion that philosophical questions about meaning can be resolved by hammering out what form should be taken by a theory specifying the meanings of all the sentences in a language, and his claim that the form of such a theory will be closely related to that of Tarski style truth definitions. Since its publication many of the papers have become classics, the content of which must be mastered by anyone interested in the philosophy of language. Examples are the contributions by Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, and Evans. Note that the content of this book is quite difficult and probably penetrable only after acquaintence w/ the basics of the philosophy of language. For that a collection like Martinich's or Ludlow's along w/ Blackburn's 'Spreading the Word' should suffice.