Semantics and the philosophy of language

the long version

The classic literature in the relatively new field of philosophic semantics has been hard to come by. The thoughtful general reader; the scholar in language study, philosophy, mathematics, the cultural sciences, and the natural sciences; and the student and teacher in both general and philosophic semantics — all have been forced either to rely on secondhand accounts of these basic papers, or cautiously to pass around from scholar to scholar the dog-eared, precious copies of the journals in which they originally appeared. In this volume Dr. Linsky has, for the first time, brought these classics in philosophic semantics together. In this extremely useful selection he has included papers which cover a variety of semantic problems, all basic to the framework of the entire field but none too difficult or technical for the non-specialist, and none too particularized or simple for the intellectually mature student or reader. None of the papers is abridged. In fact, they are exact photographic reproductions of the articles as they originally appeared. Many of the original journals and books are now practically unobtainable, so that this volume, in addition to bringing these relevant papers together, puts back into print some of the major source material for this new and rigorous inquiry into the meaning of truth and the philosophy of language.