Michael Dummett stands out among his generation as the only Britishphilosopher of language to rival in stature the Americans, Davidsonand Quine. In conjunction with them he has been responsible formuch of the framework within which questions concerning meaning andunderstanding are raised and answered in the late twentieth-centuryAnglo-American tradition. Dummett's output has been prolific andhighly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves tobe. This book sets out to rectify this situation.
Karen Green offers the first comprehensive introduction toDummett's philosophy of language, providing an overview and summaryof his most important arguments. She argues that Dummett should notbe understood as a determined advocate of anti-realism, but thathis greatest contribution to the philosophy of language is to haveset out the strengths and weaknesses of the three most influentialpositions within contemporary theory of meaning - realism, asepitomised by Frege, the holism to be found in Wittgenstein, Quineand Davidson and the constructivism which can be extracted fromBrouwer. It demonstrates that analytic philosophy as Dummettpractices it, is by no means an outmoded approach to thinking aboutlanguage, but that it is relevant both to cognitive science and tophenomenology.