Truth and Words - Hardcover

[I]t would be hard to imagine a mode of presentation more careful and lucid than Ebbs's... [T]he richness and imaginativeness of his effort will likely prove highly fruitful... His critique of token-and-ex-use-based conceptions of words and his bringing of PJSS's [practical judgments of sameness of satisfaction] to centre stage alone make the book important and worthy of careful and widespread consideration. (Michael Kac, Analysis)

a first-rate philosophical work... Ebbs's view of words and their extensions is highly original and very thoroughly and clearly argued, and may require a dramatic gestalt shift in our understanding of words and meaning. It engages with much of the best contemporary work on the philosophy of language and meaning, giving arguments against widely held views that will surely "enhance and clarify" our philosophical inquiries about words, truth, and meaning. (Cory Juhl, Philosophical Books)

To clarify and facilitate our inquiries we need to define a disquotational truth predicate that we are directly licensed to apply not only to our own sentences as we use them now, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. The conventional wisdom is that there can be no such truth predicate. For it appears that the only instances of the disquotational pattern that we are directly licensed to accept are those that define 'is true' for our own sentences as we use them now. Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory. He constructs an account of words that licenses us to rely not only on formal (spelling-based) identifications of our own words, but also on our non-deliberative practical identifications of other speakers' words and of our own words as we used them in the past. To overturn the conventional wisdom about disquotational truth, Ebbs argues, we need only combine this account of words with our disquotational definitions of truth for sentences as we use them now. The result radically transforms our understanding of truth and related topics, including anti-individualism, self-knowledge, and the intersubjectivity of logic.