Fourteen major philosophers address Stephen Schiffer’s contributions to the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and ethics. The Introduction provides an overview of Schiffer’s work and relates the individual essays to its central themes. The essays in Part I address the pleonastic ontology of Schiffer’s more recent work, focusing on the motivations behind the theory and the transition from Schiffer’s earlier approach (Hofweber), the relation to more general ontological questions (Thomasson), the identity and individuation of propositions (Rumfitt), and the role of the pleonastic theory in Sch ... More

Fourteen major philosophers address Stephen Schiffer’s contributions to the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and ethics. The Introduction provides an overview of Schiffer’s work and relates the individual essays to its central themes. The essays in Part I address the pleonastic ontology of Schiffer’s more recent work, focusing on the motivations behind the theory and the transition from Schiffer’s earlier approach (Hofweber), the relation to more general ontological questions (Thomasson), the identity and individuation of propositions (Rumfitt), and the role of the pleonastic theory in Schiffer’s treatment of cognitivism (Smith). Part II considers Schiffer’s work on propositional attitude reports, in particular, the treatment of attitude reports in Things (Ostertag), a critique of Schiffer’s “pleonastic” approach to the so-called relativity problem (Buchanan), and a detailed response to Schiffer’s “counterexample” to direct reference theories (Salmon). Part III is concerned with paradox—in particular, the sorites paradox (discussed by Edgington, Field, and Wright) at the heart of the phenomena of vagueness—as well as metaphilosophical questions concerning the nature of paradox itself (Horwich). Part IV is given over to broadly meaning-theoretical concerns: how to properly characterize speaker reference in such a way that we do justice to aphonic reference (Neale), the relevance of the meaning-theoretic project to Schiffer’s current work (Avramides) and a response to Schiffer’s critique of Russellian theories of descriptions (Bach). Schiffer’s detailed responses follow the book’s thematic organization and provide a comprehensive picture of his current views on meaning and how these views relate to the topics discussed in the individual contributions.