Book Reviews Language and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

MIT Press has given us two new introductory philosophy-of-language books, both of which fall within the category of "single-author" texts (despite the multiple authorship of one of them); that is, they are not anthologies, but presentations of the material from the perspective of the author(s). Why would a publisher issue two such texts in the same year, running the risk of having each undercut the other? One answer might be that these books address very different audiences. Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny's Language and Reality is a scholarly, high-level introduction, while Robert M. Martin's The Meaning of Language is an elementary, somewhat simplified introduction. In what follows, I shall describe and briefly summarize the two books, and conclude with some observations and recommendations.