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Natural Language: What It Means & How We Use It

by Scott Soames
Princeton University Press, $39.50

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by Scott Soames, director of the School of Philosophy at USC College and one of the world’s foremost philosophers of language. In this first volume, 15 essays span 28 years of thinking about linguistic meaning - what it is, how we use it and what questions should be answered by empirical theories dealing with it. He examines such issues as what a sentence means, what is presupposed in uttering it, what is asserted and what is merely implicated in order to distinguish different, but intricately related, kinds of linguistically expressed information.