Introduction: meaning and reference
PART I: Reference and referring
2 Definite descriptions
3 Proper names: the Description Theory
4 Proper names: Direct Reference and the Causal–Historical Theory
PART II: Theories of meaning
5 “Use” theories
6 Psychological theories: Grice’s program
7 Verificationism
8 Truth-Condition theories
PART III Pragmatics and speech acts
9 Semantic pragmatics
10 Speech acts and illocutionary force
11 Implicative relations
PART IV: The expressive and the figurative
12 Expressive language
13 Metaphor
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Biography
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).
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
