Chapter I elucidates Tolkien’s puzzling claim that The Lord of the Rings should be primarily considered as “an essay in linguistic aesthetic”. It first analyses a passing reference to the “cats of Queen Berúthiel”, described by Tolkien as the only element in The Lord of the Rings “which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun”. This example introduces a discussion of a typical pattern of composition of Tolkien’s works: this begins as an experience of purely aesthetic fascination for a linguistic entity, which is then expanded into a narrative item, and later developed into a full, meaningful tale, through a heuristic process of ‘sub-creative discovery’. The second part of the chapter investigates the theoretical implications of such an approach, reconstructing Tolkien’s perceptions on the value and heuristic potential of a ‘gratuitous’ aesthetic event, and especially of a linguistic one, given the ‘divine’ inspiration of language and its original expression of both wonder at and knowledge of created reality.

The ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy is reflected through Neurath’s writings of his British period. He responded to serious criticism that Bertrand Russell made in his book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, developing the physicalism of the Vienna Circle into a cautious approach to ‘terminology’. Neurath revealed details of his index verborum prohibitorum, a list of ‘dangerous’ words to be avoided due to their misleading and metaphysical connotations. However, Neurath was resistant to the formalist tendencies evident in the work of Vienna Circle associates, in particular Carnap’s development of semantics. Their disagreement on the matter is examined through their prolific correspondence of the 1940s. While Neurath is often portrayed as losing this battle, we discuss how his own approach to the philosophy of language (including his ‘terminology’ project) prefigured the later development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to a certain extent.

Carnap’s naturalism evidently differs from Quine’s, but the precise nature of this difference has proven elusive to generations of commentators. This chapter focuses on what Quine defends as his “provincial” naturalism against a Carnapian “cosmopolitan” alternative. The problem with this contrast, however, is that Quine does not represent a pure form of what he calls a “provincial” view – he vacillates between provincial and cosmopolitan temptations. To illustrate a purely provincial view the position of Peter Strawson is held up as an opposite, provincial extreme to Carnapian cosmopolitanism, and while Quine is clearly tempted by both these extremes, the attempt to locate him on a continuum between them is complicated by his evident indecisiveness. This is further illustrated by his tergiversations about analyticity; after initially denying that there was even an explicandum worth bothering about, he later offered his own ordinary-language-based account of analyticity, without feeling any need to supply a more exact explication; there would appear to be no way to resolve the resulting stand-off with the cosmopolitan standpoint. This chapter suggests a more robust explicandum for analyticity (and cosmopolitanism more generally). We come back, in the end, to the confrontation between Carnap and Quine in Chicago in 1950, where Carnap convinced Quine that their differences did not concern any question about which there could be right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is regretted that Quine soon lost this lesson from sight.

This chapter introduces the broad and multidisciplinary field of referring and reference, including perspectives from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. In this chapter we review some of the key contributions from these disciplines to explain the main background of influences that are still relevant to our understanding of reference and acts of referring. We then discuss traditional approaches to reference from the perspectives of text and discourse, focussing on the concepts of coreference and anaphor, and how these accounts have helped shape but also, to some extent, have limited text-based reference. Contributions from cognitive perspectives, including the role of shared information and the concept of givenness is shown to enrich our understanding of reference. The chapter establishes the reasons why reference must be viewed as addressee orientated, collaborative, and context-dependent. In doing so, we set out the reasons why an integrated approach to reference is needed.

This chapter examines the relationship between “logic,” language, and methodology in Heidegger. It begins by contrasting two ways in which one might understand that relationship: Dummett’s position as articulated in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics and Dreyfus’s influential reconstruction of Sein und Zeit. Focusing on Sein und Zeit §33, the chapter distinguishes Heidegger’s own view from each of these. First, drawing on his discussions of “grammar,” it shows where and why he diverges not just from someone like Dummett, but also from Kant. Second, it argues for the difference between the approach in this chapter and the Dreyfusian one: For Dreyfus, Heidegger’s attack on logic is ultimately a question of content, for Golob it is ultimately a question of method. The chapter closes by indicating how this analysis might be extended to texts from the 1924 Platon: Sophistes lectures to Die Sprache in the 1950s, paying particular attention to the concept of a “meta-language.”

What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what an appropriate response would be? We argue: (1) Every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behaviour is goal-directed; (2) Responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; (3) Describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountable. We conclude that interaction does not involve a binning procedure in which the stream of conduct is sorted into discrete action types. Our argument is grounded in data from recordings of talk-in-interaction.

Bakhtin's work is difficult to interpret because it amalgamates so many different intellectual strains and influences.His early interest in Neo-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology, the first largely mediated through his friend M. I. Kagan, structured his ideas permanently. His interest in and commitment to Christian thought, and Russian Orthodox thought specifically, was important but is often over-emphasised. Bakhtin's further intellectual development was spurred by encounters with Russian Formalism, linguistics (particularly early versions of sociolinguistics), and the Marxist literary debates of his time. Far from maintaining a saintly distance from the diputes around him, Bakhtin was fully engaged by and tried to participate in debates about the role of style in literary writing and the idea of realism and the positive hero.