This book collects twenty-five of the author's essays, each of which addresses a descriptive or a foundational issue that arises at the interface between linguistic semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and the philosophy of language, on the other. Arranged into three interconnected parts (I. Matters of Meaning and Truth; II. Matters of Meaning and Force; III. Knowledge Matters), the essays suggest that some key topics in the above-mentioned fields have often been approached in ways that considerably underestimate their empirical or conceptual complexity, and attempt to delineate perspectives from which, and conditions under which, an improved understanding of those topics could be sought. The book will be of interest to linguists working in semantics and pragmatics, and to philosophers working in the philosophy of language and in epistemology.

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Matters of meaning and truth
• 1. Truth ascriptions, falsity ascriptions, and the paratactic analysis of indirect discourse
• 2. The hybrid theory of mixed quotation
• 3. Self-reference and the divorce between meaning and truth
• 4. Performativity and the “true/false fetish”
• 5. Speaking of truth-telling: The view from wh-complements
• 6. The distance between “here” and “where I am”
• 7. A problem for a logic of “because”
• 8. What “lack” needs to have: A study in the semantics of privation
• 9. A fake typicality constraint on asymmetric acceptability
• 10. Correlative and noncorrelative conjunctions in argument and nonargument positions
• Part II. Matters of meaning and force
• 11. Yes–no questions and the myth of content invariance
• 12. Deontic trouble in speech act botany
• 13. The gap between speech acts and mental states
• 14. A purported refutation of some theories of assertion
• 15. Two consequences of hinting
• 16. How to test a test for perlocutionary act names
• 17. Speaker meaning, sentence meaning, and metaphor
• 18. Voices and noises in the theory of speech acts
• 19. Searle’s derivation of promissory obligation
• 20. Searle’s Making the Social World
• 21. A paradox of cooperation in the theory of implicatures
• 22. An inferential impasse in the theory of implicatures
• Part III. Knowledge matters
• 23. How to forget that “know” is factive
• 24. Three problems for the knowledge rule of assertion
• 25. Grammars as objects of knowledge: The availability of dispositionalism
• References
• Index