Word and Plan - (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by John MacFarlane (Paperback)

About the Book

John MacFarlane gives a novel expressivist account of vagueness and explores its implications for semantics, pragmatics, thought, and disagreement.

Book Synopsis

We commonly believe that communication is successful when a hearer grasps what a speaker means. But Abe can assert "Sam is tall" without having any definite intention about how tall one must be to count as "tall," and Bertha can understand his assertion without grasping such an intention. What exactly has been communicated in such a case? John MacFarlane argues that standard models of meaning and communication cannot answer this question. To answer it, he proposes, we need to see vague talk as not purely factual but in part expressive of linguistic plans. In this book, he gives a novel expressivist account of vagueness and explores its implications for semantics, pragmatics, thought, and disagreement.

Review Quotes

This is an excellent book that makes an important and original contribution. Many observers outside of philosophy are puzzled by the fact that problems about vagueness have been such a preoccupation in the philosophy of language, but Word and Plan explains precisely why these issues are so important. MacFarlane's arguments, both constructive and critical, are incisive and convincing.--Robert Stalnaker, author of Propositions: Ontology and Logic

About the Author

John MacFarlane is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and Its Applications (2014) and Philosophical Logic: A Contemporary Introduction (2021).