This book is a stalwart attempt to renew meaning understood in terms of speech-acts. It is a sweeping effort, addressing metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of action and philosophy of mind, and of course, semantics and pragmatics. While I suspect that fans of the more traditional, proposition-based approach to semantics will find much to complain about in this book, it nevertheless represents a significant step forward for speech-act theory and, in my view, for semantics as a whole. . . . This challenging book renews my faith in the possibility of a workable speech-act semantics, one that takes intention and action as its starting points and does justice to the complexity of natural language. . . . this is an outstanding book, one that represents more than a decade of careful reflection on
Michael ORourke, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
continued............. the details of semantic theory. While I doubt many in the orthodox community will be moved to convert, they will certainly be moved to reflect, and that is about all you can ask from a book as contrary as this one. It may not renew meaning, but it should renew interest in speech act theory. I hope that Renewing Meaning receives the attention it deserves--semantics would be the better for it.
Michael ORourke, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews