Customer Reviews

Language and Reality - 2nd Edition: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

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Devitt and Sterelny's "Language and Reality" (along with A. P. Martinich's "Philosophy of Language," 4th ed.) was the required text for a graduate philosophy of language class I recently took. I found the book both challenging and enlightening.

By reading the Table of Contents in Amazon.com's nifty "Look Inside" feature, you can see pretty much everything that is covered in the book. Therefore, I shall just describe a couple of things that might be difficult to detect without having the book in your hands.

First, a word about writing style: Still active in their careers, Devitt and Sterelny (hereafter 'D&S') make no attempt to hide their positions on the issues they address in this book. In my experience, two felicitous things came from this. Regarding the text, on the one hand, such an approach gave a liveliness and immediacy to the prose. In the classroom, on the other hand, D&S's lack of neutrality provided my professor, who does not agree with them on all points, an excellent backdrop against which he detailed competing arguments.

Second, each chapter ends with a concise list of recommended readings. In light of the above point, if you're reading this book without a professor describing counterarguments to D&S's positions, then these recommended readings might prove quite helpful.

Third, the arguments and theories in this book are themselves very well laid out and with considerable detail, especially for an introduction. Moreover, the progession from one argument or theory to the next is quite smooth.

Finally, I should say that if you're very new to analytical philosophy, then this book, because of the amount of detail, might be a bit rough going, in which case I would highly recommend William Lycan's "Philosophy of Language."

Bottom Line: If you want a solid introduction to the philosophy of language and you feel comfortable with moderately dense analytical argumentation, then this book is for you.

As an English professor strongly interested in philosophy but still an amateur, I have read quite a number of philosophical introductions, and this is one of the best. Some introductions proceed by giving you a ground-up account of the basic issues and arguments. The effect can be rather dull. Others proceed philosopher by philosopher, giving accounts of important positions that have actually been taken. The effect can be confusing. This book combines both strategies quite successfully, avoiding the pitfalls of each. It provides clear, well-considered accounts of the basic issues but also introduces real philosophical interlocutors. The order of the chapters is cleverly devised so that one has the experience of a coherent exploration, becoming both wider and deeper as it goes. That the authors take a general position of their own is very helpful to beginners in orienting themselves within the discipline. Also, in the later sections of the book, the authors show the influence that certain positions in language philosophy have exercized in fields beyond--in the history of science, linguistics, literary criticism, and discussions of "culture." The reader comes away not only enlightened about the basic issues of the philosophy of language but convinced of their importance.

Without being too technical (we can always skip the hardest stuff), this book is a great introduction to further eventual philosophical inquiry. The authors' view on philosophy of language, being quite critical, is pretty interesting and sometimes surprising. Philosophy, according to them, should be empirical. Their arguments are pretty compeling, and the prose ok to understand or grasp most of it. However, if anyone would want to buy it just to read randomly pages or chapters inside, this book would not be the best choice. References to previous chapters can be find everywhere. This book is full of useful data, and needs to be read preferably in a logical way (i.e. from the beggining to the end): this book is not a text-book with articles that can be read independently.
"Language and Reality" is pretty comprehensive; therefore it adresses certain things (theories) in a broad way to, most of the time, criticize them. The part talking about Wittgenstien (2pages) is disappointing. Even though we still can "grasp" the spirit of what he's done, it's not enough too me...
Overall, this book is really good, and I mostly agree with the authors, especially about their theory of meaning that is not based on any picture or strict description.