Philosophy of Language

A concise and demanding survey of the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition, written for the Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy series. Soames traces how the study of meaning developed from Frege's distinction between sense and reference and Russell's theory of descriptions, through Tarski's theory of truth and Davidson's proposal that a theory of meaning is a theory of truth conditions, to the possible-worlds semantics of later logicians. He then discusses the revolution brought by Kripke's work on names and necessity and by theories of indexicals and direct reference, the debate about what propositions are, and the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers assert. Soames argues for his own views at several points, particularly on propositions and the semantics–pragmatics boundary, while presenting the history fairly.

It explains in a short space how the main theories of meaning arose and where they now stand, by someone who shaped the debate.