Product Description: Immunity to error through misidentification is recognised as an important feature of certain kinds of first-person judgments, as well as arguably being a feature of other indexical or demonstrative judgments. In this collection of newly commissioned essays, the contributors present a variety of approaches to it, engaging with historical and empirical aspects of the subject as well as contemporary philosophical work...read more

Product Description: Francois Recanati presents his theory of mental files, a new way of understanding reference in language and thought. He aims to recast the "nondescriptivist" approach to reference that has dominated the philosophy of language and mind in the late twentieth century...read more

François Recanati provides an original defense of "contextualism" in contribution to the current debate about the best definition of semantics and pragmatics. Is "What is said" determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of "speaker's meaning"? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is "literal meaning"? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In this book Professor Recanati sets out to defend and systematize the much-discussed "theory of direct reference", according to which the contribution made by a referential term, (for example, a proper name or a demonstrative) to the proposition expressed by the sentence where it occurs is its reference. To deal with the objections traditionally levelled against that theory, he puts forward a general account of "de re" thoughts and communication which blends insights from both the Fregean and the Russellian traditions. In the second part of the book, recent advances in pragmatics are presented and used to shed light on the referential/attributive distinction (with respect to both definite descriptions and indexicals) and belief reports. New treatments of some of the major topics in the philosophy of mind and language are offered along the way. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The author argues that no utterance can be fully understood simply in terms of its linguistic meaning but only with regard to contextual inference. He refutes the views of Austin and Searle and deals with major issues of pragmatics and speech-act theory.