Publisher's Synopsis
For at least two decades, philosophers of language have largely agreed that the traditional question, "what is meaning", can be replaced by a question about the form a satisfactory theory of meaning must take. The search for such a form has taken place on two levels: on the one hand, philosophers and linguists have made analyses of fragments of natural languages by applying the methods of formal semantics; and, on the other hand, they have introduced general criteria for the adequacy of these theories.;The contributors to this book demonstrate the complexity and difficulty of this search for a unified theory of meaning through an examination of diverse topics: the nature of a theory of truth, the semantics of action sentences, Fregean and anti-Fregean theories of names and propositional-attitude contexts, the representation of meaning in AI, and Peirce's semiotic theory of logic.
