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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
The essays collected in this volume were written in a period of rethinking and reconsidering much of my philosophical position. A look at the introduction to the second volume of my Philosophical Papers, and at the essay titled ‘Language and reality’ in that volume, will reveal that in 1975 I thought that the errors and mistakes I detected in analytical philosophy were occasioned by ‘naive verificationism’ and ‘sophisticated verificationism’. I described myself as a ‘realist’ (without any qualifying adjective), and I chiefly emphasized the importance of reference in determining meaning in opposition to the idea, traditional among both realists and idealists, that it is meaning that determines reference. Reference itself I described as a matter of causal connections. The following quotation (from ‘Language and reality’) illustrates these themes at work:
As language develops, the causal and noncausal links between bits of language and aspects of the world become more complex and more various. To look for any one uniform link between word or thought and object of word or thought is to look for the occult; but to see our evolving and expanding notion of reference as just a proliferating family is to miss the essence of the relation between language and reality. The essence of the relation is that language and thought do asymptotically correspond to reality, to some extent at least. A theory of reference is a theory of the correspondence in question.
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