The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, (...) and psychologists. (shrink)

It is often said that a person P knows the meaning of a sentence S if P knows S’ s truth-conditions, in the sense that given any possible world, P knows whether S is true in that world. This idea of sentence-meaning corresponds fairly closely to what Frege, Russell, Carnap, and other philosophers have had in mind in speaking of the senses, propositional contents, or “locutionary” meanings of sentences; and, not unnaturally, it has encouraged semanticists such as David Lewis, Robert (...) Stalnaker and Max Cresswell to suggest that sentence-meanings or propositions simply are functions from the set of possible worlds onto the truth-values. (shrink)