The Things We Mean

Stephen Schiffer presents an innovative account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of "pleonastic propositions" to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation.