Philosophy of Meaning and Representation

Surveying all the landmark developments in the recent philosophy of language, the book focusses on ‘meaning’ and ‘linguistic representations’ in its thematic effort to propose a representational theory of meaning. Meaning is the autonomous component of language: its semantic content and its essence as well. The book, thus, tries to link meaning with linguistic representations — which, in themselves, not only are logico-grammatical structures, but also represent the world around us. Also attempting to reconcile the conflicting claims of the realists and the anti-realists, the author demonstrates how we have no choice between meaning as ‘truth-conditions’ and meaning as ‘justification-conditions’, since both are equally rooted in the semantic space of language-use involving linguistic representations. Dr. Pradhan’s analyses have, at their base, his indepth, critical study of the theory of linguistic representation in Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Dummett. In sum, the book lends a forceful support to semantics and, more specially, to the autonomy of meaning. And the theory of representation, argued for here, promises to fulfil the twin theses of representationality and autonomy of meaning. It is an insightfully analytical work of immense usefulness to the scholars of philosophy concerned with linguistic representation, semantics and meaning.