Content, Cognition, and Communication

Nathan Salmon presents a selection of his essays from the early 1980s to 2006, on a set of closely connected topics central to analytic philosophy. The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first contains six essays on the theme of direct reference, and associated issues regarding names and descriptions, demonstratives and reflexivity. The four essays in the second section, under the heading of apriority, concern particular consequences of Millianism with respect to the semantic-epistemological status of certain special kinds of sentences. The five essays in the third section develop Salmon's project of reconciling Millianism with a host of problems posed by locutions of propositional attitude, especially by attributions of belief. The volume concludes with four essays about the distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

- Introduction - I. Direct Reference - 1: A Millian Heir Rejects the Wages of Sinn (1990) - 2: Reflexivity (1986) - 3: Reflections on Reflexivity (1992) - 4: Demonstrating and Necessity (2004) - 5: Are General Terms Rigid? (2003) - 6: A Theory of Bondage (2006) - II. Apriority - 7: How to Measure the Standard Metre (1987) - 8: How Not to Become a Millian Heir (1991) - 9: Relative and Absolute Apriority (1993) - 10: Analyticity and Apriority (1993) - III. Belief - 11: Illogical Belief (1989) - 12: The Resilience of Illogical Belief (2005) - 13: Being of Two Minds: Belief with Doubt (1995) - 14: Relational Belief (1995) - 15: Is De Re Belief Reducible to De Dicto? (1998) - IV. Semantics and Pragmatics - 16: Assertion and Incomplete Definite Descriptions (1982) - 17: The Pragmatic Fallacy (1991) - 18: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (2004) - 19: Two Conceptions of Semantics (2004) - Bibliography of Nathan Salmon, 1979 onwards