the most influential figure in American and British philosophy today
a new edition of a collection of contemporary classics from Davidson
features previously uncollected essay
to be published simultaneously with the new edition of Essays on Actions and Events and the new volume Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
first edition sold 20,000 copies
volumes 4 and 5 to follow in the next year or two

Donald Davidson presents a new edition of the 1984 volume which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation has been a central point of reference and a focus of controversy in the subject ever since, and its influence has extended into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. This new edition features an additional essay, previously uncollected.
The central question which these essays address is what it is for words to mean what they do. Davidson argues that a philosophically instructive theory of meaning should acknowledge the holistic nature of linguistic understanding, in that it should provide an interpretation of all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker or group of speakers; and that it should not rely upon the concepts it attempts to explain, in that it should be verifiable independently of knowledge of the detailed propositional attitudes of the speaker. Among the topics covered in the essays are the relation between theories of truth and theories of meaning, translation, quotation, belief, radical interpretation, reference, metaphor, and communication.

Readership: All philosophers, linguists, and psychologists interested in philosophy; anyone else interested in language and mind.

Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgements
Introduction
1.
Truth and Meaning
Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages (1965)
2. Truth and Meaning (1967)
3. True to the Facts (1969)
4. Semantics for Natural Languages (1970)
5. In Defence of Convention T (1973)
6.
Applications
Quotation (1979)
7. On Saying That (1968)
8. Moods and Performances (1979)
9.
Radical Interpretation
Radical Interpretation (1973)
10. Belief and the Basis of Meaning
Appendix to Essay 10: Reply to Quine and Lewis (1974)
11. Thought and Talk (1975)
12. Reply to Foster (1976)
13.
Language and Reality
On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974)
14. The Method of Truth in Metaphysics
15. Reality Without Reference (1977)
16. The Inscrutibility of Reference (1979)
17.
Limits of the Literal
What Metaphors Mean (1978)
18. Communication and Convention (1982)
Bibliographical References, Index