This book is available in Oxford Scholarship Online
| Reviews |
| - ''Neales book is written with such thoroughness, clarity, and rigor . . . No one with an interest in intensionality or the semantics of descriptions will want to miss this book.'' - John MacFarlane, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
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| Description | | - eagerly awaited new book from an outstanding philosopher of language
- follow-up book to the classic Descriptions
(MIT Press 1990)
- highly original and powerful exploration of the relation between language, thought, and the world
- all philosophers working on language, logic, or metaphysics will want to read this
- also a significant contribution to the study of the history of twentieth century philosophy
| Facing Facts
is a powerful, original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of slices of reality. Representations that are accurate are usually said to be true, to correspond to the facts - this is the foundation of correspondence theories of truth. A number of prominent philosophers have tried to
undermine the idea that propositions, facts and correspondence can play any useful role in philosophy, and formal arguments
have been advanced to demonstrate that, under seemingly uncontroversial conditions, such entities collapse into an undifferentiated unity. The demise of individual facts is meant to herald the dawn of a new era in
philosophy, in which debates about scepticism, realism,
subjectivity, representational and computational theories of mind, possible worlds, and divergent conceptual schemes that represent reality in different ways to
different persons, periods, or cultures evaporate through lack of subject matter.
By carefully untangling a host of intersecting metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and logical issues, and providing rich and original
analyses of key aspects of the work of Frege, Russell, Gödel, and
Davidson, Stephen Neale demonstrates that arguments for the collapse of facts are considerably more complex and interesting than either friend or foe ever imagined. A number of deep semantic facts emerge along with a
powerful proof: while it is technically possible to avoid the collapse of facts, rescue the idea of representations
of reality, and thereby face anew the problems raised by the sceptic or the relativist, doing so requires
making some tough semantic decisions about predicates and descriptions. It is simply impossible, Neale shows, to invoke representations, facts, states, or propositions without making hard choices - choices that may send many
philosophers scurrying back to the drawing board. Facing Facts
will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and mind, and logic, and will have profound implications far beyond.
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Readership: Scholars and students of philosophy of language, logic, and the history of philosophy. Also scholars of linguistics.
| Contents |
Preface
1.
The End of Representation
2.
Davidson: Truth, Correspondence, Representation
3.
Frege: Composition, Reference, Truth
4.
Russell: Facts, Abbreviations, Descriptions
5.
Godel: Facts and Descriptions
6.
Extensionality
7.
Principles of Inference
8.
Connective Proofs and Logical Equivalence
9.
Connective Proofs and Godelian Equivalence
10.
Descriptions and Equivalence
11.
Facts Revisited
Glossary
References, Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Stephen Neale, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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