Philosophy of Language

A Contemporary Introduction
4. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-07615-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 300 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy

Now in its Fourth Edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena.

Author William G. Lycan structures the book’s 13 chapters into four general parts. Part I, Reference and Referring, includes topics such as Russell's Theory of Descriptions (and its failings), Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the Description Theory of proper names, Searle's Cluster Theory, and the Causal-Historical Theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes an introduction to the Relevance approach to pragmatics. Part IV, The Expressive and the Figurative, examines various forms of expressive language, as well as what "metaphorical meaning" is and how most listeners readily grasp it.

Features of Philosophy of Language include:

- chapter overviews and summaries

- clear supportive examples

- study questions

- annotated lists of further reading

- a glossary.

Key Updates to the Fourth Edition:

- a new section on the Predicativist theory of proper names

- an expanded section on Inferentialist theories of meaning

- a new section on Dynamic (“update”) theories of meaning

- a separate section on varieties of presupposition

- an all-new section on “applied” philosophy of language, listing eleven recent areas of research

- up-to-date coverage of new literature, further reading lists, and the bibliography.

Zielgruppe

Undergraduate Advanced and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lycan, William G.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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).