Meaning without Analyticity

Meaning without Analyticity draws upon the author’s essays and articles, over a period of 20 years, focused on language, logic and meaning. The book explores the prospect of a non-behavioristic theory of cognitive meaning which rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction, Quinean behaviorism, and the logical and social-intellectual excesses of extreme holism. Cast in clear, perspicuous language and oriented to scientific discussions, this book takes up the challenges of philosophical communication and evaluation implicit in the recent revival of the pragmatist tradition—especially those arising from its relation to prior American analytic thought. This volume continues the work of Callaway’s 1993 book, Context for Meaning and Analysis, building on the “turn toward pragmatism.” The premise of this collection is that we begin to answer the questions posed by the revival of the pragmatist tradition by bring it into fuller contact with American analytic philosophy of the sort which eclipsed it during the Cold War. In this book, a lively and continuing interest in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson and Putnam meets up with equal engagement and competence concerning C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. The formalism of analytic philosophy encounters a logically articulate version of the contextualism implicit in the pragmatist tradition, and orientation to natural science is supplemented by a systematic stress on social and cultural contexts of inquiry.