Review by Choice Review
When Alfred Tarski famously explained that snow is white if and only if "snow is white," he was making a claim--though Soames (philosophy, Univ. of Southern California) would argue that it is an incomplete claim--about the relationship between the proposition and the state of affairs that it was meant to represent. Likewise as Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege were developing a truth functional predicate calculus, the goal is to close the conceptual gap between something being F and the proposition that something is F. Typically, this has taken the form of theorists identifying the semantic content of a sentence with information about some state of affairs in the world, though, Soames argues, the traditional deficit lies in what exactly that information is. To correct this deficit, he argues that one should think of propositions as things that people do, rather than as abstract entities. By incorporating elements of philosophy of mind into language and metaphysics, this book represents an important turn in thinking about propositions. The book is certain to have a significant impact in discussions of logic, language, and mind in 21st-century analytic philosophy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Robert C Robinson, City University of New York
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
