Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
This book is the product of a transatlantic cross-fertilisation. The authors found themselves from 1991 onwards members of the same department, at the University of Utah, to which Harrison had moved from a British university (Sussex). At that time, Hanna was nourishing some doubts about various forms of meaning-scepticism, mainly in Quine and Kripke. Harrison had a number of projects on hand, one of which was an absurdly ambitious attempt to rethink the philosophy of language since Frege from the standpoint of an idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Wittgenstein. Some of the component parts of this enterprise, including a series of exegetical studies of middle-period Wittgenstein, had seen or were about to see print, but the project as a whole was, to put it bluntly, stalled, and had been stalled, except on its exegetical front, since the early 1980s. Conversation between us at first revealed some points of contact between our two projects. Then we began to see the possibility of certain large structural moves that would get Harrison's project moving again, in directions that would provide a framework for Hanna's ideas. At first we thought the work might yield a joint paper. Later we realised that it would have to be a series of papers. Finally we resigned ourselves to producing a joint book. By this time so many changes had occurred in each of our minds, stemming from objections or suggestions by the other, that we would have been at a loss to say which of us “owned” which parts of the project.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Word and WorldPractice and the Foundations of Language, pp. xi - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003