No label defined (Q4951952)

This is a reprint of the 1983 (M.I.T. Press) book, with a new Introduction to the Reissue Edition by the original authors. The book is of importance in the history of the subject, and its renewed availability will be welcomed by many teaching courses in semantics whose students have found it difficult to obtain. As the authors say, ``it is probably fair to say, however, that in its original homes, philosophy and semantics, situation semantics has been more successful in its broad themes than in its specific formalisms and proposals'' (p. xxx). It is ironic that what Barwise and Perry saw as a \textit{weakness} in Frege's work, his semantic holism in focusing on the meaning of sentences (rather than of words, as had been previously usual), is regarded as a \textit{strength} in his work by Inferential Semantics, the tradition deriving via \textit{Robert Brandom} [``Making it explicit'' (Harvard U.P.) (1994)] from Wilfred Sellars; and it is a pity that in their Introduction to the Reissue Edition, Barwise and Perry do not take up the question of comparing these two approaches to meaning.