'Marvellously clear... playfully persuasive' Richard Dawkins 'Full of Fascinating details. A delight to read.' Tim Harford 'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett What is language? Why do we have it? Why does that matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains: · How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. · Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. · Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language. · Why humans have language, but chimps don't. · How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution. · How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think. ·And ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope. Christiansen and Chater's The Language Game draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.

Wittgenstein's Account of Truth challenges the view that semantic antirealists attribute to Wittgenstein: that we cannot meaningfully call verification-transcendent statements "true." Ellenbogen argues that Wittgenstein would not have held that we should revise our practice of treating certain statements as true or false, but instead would have held that we should revise our view of what it means to call a statement true. According to the dictum "meaning is use, " what makes it correct to call a statement "true" is not its correspondence with how things are, but our criterion for determining its truth. What it means for us to call a statement "true" is that we currently judge it true, knowing that we may some day revise the criteria whereby we do so.

First Published in 1980 (English Translation) Towards a Transformation of Philosophy presents selected essays from Karl -Otto Apel’s two- volume German collection that was published in 1973 under the title Transformation der Philosophie. Karl -Otto Apel’s studies in philosophy and the social sciences can be said to have bridged the gap that had hitherto existed between the Anglo-Saxon traditions of analytical philosophy of language and pragmatism, and the philosophical traditions of the European continent of phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. Apel points to language as the crucial dimension in the constitution of historical meaning and therefore as the historical condition for the possibility of truth. In this context he discusses the hermeneutic dimension of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and that of his followers, together with the development of pragmatism and with recent trends in Chomsky’s linguistics. In arguing for the complementarity of technical and practical interests in acquiring knowledge for a critical theory of society Apel examines the preconditions for an emancipatory critique of ideology and the communication community as the predeterminate of both the social sciences and moral discourse. In all the essays, Apel sets out to counter the positivistic and scientistic restrictions placed upon a satisfactory understanding of the preconditions for the possibility and validity of human knowledge. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of philosophy.

Wittgenstein's aphoristic style holds great charm, but also a great danger: the reader is apt to glean too much from a single fragment and too little from the fragments as a whole. In my first confron tations with the Philosophical Investigations I was such a reader, and so, it turned out, were most of the writers on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Wittgenstein's remarkable ability to bring together many facets of his thought in one fragment is fully exploited in the critical literature; but hardly any attention is paid to the connection with other fragments, let alone to the many hitherto unpublished manuscripts of which the Philosophical Investigations is the final product. The result of this fragmentary and ahistorical approach to Wittgenstein's later work is a host of contradictory interpretations. What Wittgenstein really wanted to say remains insufficiently clear. Opinions are also strongly divided about the value of his work. Some authors have been encouraged by his aphorisms and rhetorical questions to dismiss the whole Cartesian tradition or to halt new movements in linguistics or psychology; others, exasperated, reject his philo sophy as anti-scientific conceptual conservatism. After consulting unpublished notebooks and manuscripts which Wittgenstein wrote between 1929 and 1951, I became a very different reader. Wittgenstein turned out to be a kind of Leonardo da Vinci, who pursued a form from which every sign of chisel ling, every attempt at improvement, had been effaced.

This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar, functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics. An attempt is made to develop a fairly abstract unified theoretical frame work for the description of discourse which actually helps explain concrete facts of the discourse grammar of a naturallanguage.2 This plan is reflected in the division of the study into two parts. In the first part, a semiformal framework for describing conversational discourse is developed in some detail. In the second part, this framework is applied to the functional syntax of English. The relation of the discourse grammar of Part II to the descriptive frame work of Part I can be instructively compared to the relation of Tarskian semantics to model theory. Tarski's semantics defmes a concept of truth of a sentence in a model, an independently identified construct. Analogously, my rules of discourse grammar defme a concept of appropriateness of a sentence to a given context. The task of the first Part of the essay is to characterize the relevant notion of context. Although my original statement of the problem was linguistic - how to describe the meaning, or function, of certain aspects of word order and intonation - Part I is largely an application of various methods and results of philosophical logic. The justification of the interdisciplinary approach is the simplicity and naturalness of the eventual answers to specific linguistic problems in Part II.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is one of the great works of 20th Century philosophy, destined to join the philosophical canon. Like all great works of philosophy, it poses new problems, while creating new forms of argument and persuasion. But unlike most contemporary philosophy texts, it is not structured by chapter and section headings, but rather by numbered passages -- evidence of Wittgenstein's distinctive style and profound originality. This anthology draws together in one volume several recent essays that help to make his problems and arguments more accessible. The essays are grouped into four sections that roughly correspond to the development that one finds in the Investigations. These sections are: reference and meaning; rules and their application; the interiority of mind, and the alleged uses of private languages; and necessity and grammar. Both readers who are new to the Investigations as well as those who are familiar with Wittgenstein's work should find these essays illuminating and engaging.

This book presents new issues in the study of the interface of emotions and language, and their use in social context. Two fundamental questions are tackled: the way different languages encode emotional information and the core role emotions play in languages' structure, use and learning. Seldom treated means of expressing emotions (such as interjections, conditionals, scalarity, allocentric constructions), the social and professional impact of emotions and the latest developments in the interface of speech recognition / emotions are some of the key contributions to this volume. The cross-cultural perspective contrasts new couples of languages (among which Australian aboriginal languages, Cypriot Greek, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) and addresses sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discursive issues. Most of the papers attempt interesting theoretical articulations that aim at a better understanding of the linguistic and sociolinguistic nature of emotions. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers interested in emotions, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as prosody and philosophy of language.

This is a comprehensive introduction to the history of Western Philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Twentieth Century thought. In addition to all the key figures, the book covers figures whose contributions have so far been overlooked, such as Vico, Montesquieu, Durkheim and Weber. Along with in-depth discussion of the philosophical movements, Skirbekk and Gilje also discuss the natural sciences, the establishment of the Humanities, Socialism and Fascism, Psychoanalysis, and the rise of the social sciences. History of Western Thought is an ideal introduction to philosophy and the sociological and scientific structures that have shaped modern day philosophy.

In spite of the lack of plausible alternatives to liberal democracy, the age of globalization has ushered in serious challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the nation state. The contributors in this collection explore the frontiers of normative and empirical legitimacy research, drawing upon a range of key conceptual and methodological issues.

This book is the final outcome of two projects. My first project was to publish a set of texts written by Schrodinger at the beginning of the 1950's for his seminars and lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These almost completely forgotten texts contained important insights into the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they provided several ideas which were missing or elusively expressed in SchrOdinger's published papers and books of the same period. However, they were likely to be misinterpreted out of their context. The problem was that current scholarship could not help very much the reader of these writings to figure out their significance. The few available studies about SchrOdinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally excellent, but almost entirely restricted to the initial period 1925-1927. Very little work has been done on Schrodinger's late views on the theory he contributed to create and develop. The generally accepted view is that he never really recovered from his interpretative failure of 1926-1927, and that his late reflections (during the 1950's) are little more than an expression of his rising nostalgia for the lost ideal of picturing the world, not to say for some favourite traditional picture. But the content and style of Schrodinger's texts of the 1950's do not agree at all with this melancholic appraisal; they rather set the stage for a thorough renewal of accepted representations. In order to elucidate this paradox, I adopted several strategies.