Abstract

The unusual orientation of this essay in the philosophy of language is most evident in the highly polemical epilogue, where the "failure" of analytic philosophers to solve what the author considers the most basic problem in the field is traced to Hobbes and Leibniz, while credit for inspiring the author’s own position is given to Aquinas, Husserl, and a seventeenth-century writer named Jean Poinsot. The most basic problem in the philosophy of language, as Adler sees it, is that of identifying the conditions of the possibility of meaning acquisition, "the factors that must be operative in every case for any meaningless notation to become a meaningful word." The pivotal third chapter of the book contains a long argument for Adler’s solution to this problem: that categorematic words acquire what Adler calls referential significance by being "imposed" on apprehended objects whereas syncategorematic words like "or" and "of" acquire syntactic significance by imposition on "the mind’s own acts and operations as objects of reflexive thought." In subsequent chapters Adler examines in great detail the ontology required by this solution, one in which the intentional existence of apprehended objects is distinguished not only from the subjective existence of ideas but also from the real existence of things.