Word and Plan
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€120.99
A01=John MacFarlane
Author_John MacFarlane
Category=CFG
Category=GTC
Category=QDHR9
Category=QDTK
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eq_dictionaries-language-reference
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forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780231212809
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 2026
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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We commonly believe that communication is successful when a hearer grasps what a speaker means. But Abe can assert “Sam is tall” without having any definite intention about how tall one must be to count as “tall,” and Bertha can understand his assertion without grasping such an intention. What exactly has been communicated in such a case? John MacFarlane argues that standard models of meaning and communication cannot answer this question. To answer it, he proposes, we need to see vague talk as not purely factual but in part expressive of linguistic plans. In this book, he gives a novel expressivist account of vagueness and explores its implications for semantics, pragmatics, thought, and disagreement.
John MacFarlane is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and Its Applications (2014) and Philosophical Logic: A Contemporary Introduction (2021).
