Simon Blackburn

This chapter offers a tongue-in-cheek indictment of analytic philosophy for providing us with philosophical resources too impoverished to be capable of making sense of the poetic use of language and its significance in human life. The contemporary philosopher’s Fregean inheritance, concerned as it is with truth and reference—poems can appear to have neither—make it very difficult to acknowledge the philosophical, moral, and cultural value of the poet’s labour. The chapter shows that the matter is not as bleak as it seems, but there are concerns dear to many philosophers that reveal them to have a radically different set of expectations about language than the poet does. In respect to the ancient feud, the chapter ultimately concludes that it is the poet’s sensitivity to language that has the greater claim to being ‘our best guide to who we are, and even to where we ought to be heading’.

This paper is an attempt to undermine the view of those that adopt an ‘entangling’ view of thick concepts. Many of them think that it is only by adopting this view that one can make sense of the civilized ways of thinking about learning, understanding, and various other forms of human activity. In their view, disentanglers, such as expressivists, cannot say all of the things that right-minded people should say. This paper argues for the opposite view and it does so by focussing on Hilary Putnam's recent work and his discussions of, amongst other things, economic theory, the fact-value distinction, and philosophical theorizing about science.

The four words of my title form a set of cardinal points in current debates about semantic theory and the shape it should take. This chapter notes that in the contemporary debates most combinations are found and probably as many denials that those combinations can be motivated, or coherent, or even consistent. Yet, there are reasonable readings of all of them on which these questions become focused and even capable of fairly definitive answers. It is the purpose of this chapter to lay out the landscape and to invite others to use my marks in the jungle when plotting their own routes.

This volume is designed to set out some of the central issues in the theory of truth. It begins with writings by F. H. Bradley, William James, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell, and continues with the classical discussions from the middle of the century (including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Austin), ending with a selection of contemporary contributions, including essays from Donald Davison and Richard Rorty. The editors provide a substantial introduction, in which they map out this terrain and look at how the debates relate to further issues, such as work on the liar paradox and formal truth theories.