Description: The essays in this volume are addressed to the question of what it is for words to mean what they do. The author argues that a philosophically instructive theory of meaning should acknowledge the holistic nature of linguistic understanding, in that it should provide an interpretation of all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker or group of speakers; and that it should not rely upon the concepts it attempts to explain, in that it should be verifiable independently of knowledge of the detailed propositional attitudes of the speaker. The collection brings together for the first time some of Donald Davidson's most influential and important contributions to the philosophy of language, which have hitherto remained scattered and hard to obtain.

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