account in (canonically) compositional terms for the sorts of local variations ininterpretation that appear to justify TCP. In that discussion, however, we are sim-ply told that at the current stage, it is not clear how much difference there isbetween such accounts and TCP. Yet, it seems to me, they must be distinct: theformer sticks to a traditional picture of compositionality and of the role of prag-matics; the latter doesn’t. In my view, a more conclusive resolution of this debatewas needed and would have constituted significant progress.

I have drawn attention to isolated sections of the book, but I should observethat, as a whole, Truth-Conditional Pragmatics is an extremely broad and detailedeffort. Given its genesis as a collection of essays, its argumentative progression isremarkably transparent (at the same time, however, the book is not quite as cohe-sive as its predecessor). Its breadth will make it appealing to the experts and itsclarity will make it accessible to those who are looking for an opinionated entrypoint into the debate on contextualism and linguistic meaning.

FABRIZIO CARIANINorthwestern University

Objectivity and the Parochial. BY CHARLES TRAVIS. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. 361. Price

£45.00.)

Travis is a philosopher who has heroes and ideas – and he ascribes the ideas tothe heroes. The ideas are of considerable interest, but their ascription to the her-oes – in particular Frege and the later Wittgenstein – is largely misascription. Tobenefit from this collection of Travis’ papers one has therefore to get beyond hispersistent fashioning of the gods after his own image. A second obstacle is hisfrequent lack of interest in offering substantial argument (sometimes any argu-ment) for his exegetical or philosophical claims; rival accounts and interpretationsare rarely considered. And then there is his difficult prose style, and also a mad-dening habit of referring only to German editions of Frege. But it is definitelyworth the battle: these papers form a rich, challenging and sometimes inspiringbody of work.

The two dominant ideas of the collection are a thoroughgoing contextualismand a version of the correspondence theory of truth. Travis’s contextualism is wellknown: what is said on a particular occasion, what truth condition is there had, isnot a matter merely of the linguistic meaning of the words deployed but dependsalso on the role or interest of the saying in the local interaction of which it is apart. So if a shopping bag has been put down on a rug, an utterance of the Eng-lish sentence ‘The meat is on the rug’, meaning what it does, might be true ifcooking needs to begin but false if one is concerned about staining. As Travismakes clear, his thinking here is a development of Austin. Considerably less con-vincing is his claim that the first 90 odd sections of Philosophical Investigations, inparticular Wittgenstein’s introduction there of the notion of a language game, isan extended argument for the same conclusion.

Travis’s correspondence theory of truth is an idea, ascribed every time – butjust bafflingly – to Frege, that ‘truth is a point at which the conceptual and the

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non-conceptual meet’ (p. 259). In more detail, Travis imagines a conceptual realmcontaining not only regular concepts such as being empty but also ‘zero-place con-cepts’ (roughly, sayables/truth conditions) such as my cup’s being empty. Contrastingwith this conceptual realm is a non-conceptual world containing not only my cupbut also the ‘bit of history’ (p. 311), which is my cup’s being as it is. A belief orassertion that my cup is empty is then true if, and only if, my cup’s being as it isinstances the zero-concept my cup’s being empty. The first concern one has with thisidea is to wonder how ‘my cup’s being as it is instances my cup’s being empty’ is tobe something other than a periphrasis of ‘my cup is empty’ – how, that is, thetheory is to have content. Frustratingly little is said in these papers to answer thisworry. The account is standardly introduced with the remark that things mighthave been slightly different with my cup from how they are and yet still havebeen such that it is empty. The cup might have had in it the remains of tearather than coffee. This point is suggestive, but in itself not more than suggestive.And as for how the conceptual and non-conceptual meet, Travis – rightly orwrongly – doesn’t want to offer anything beyond a claim that it is intrinsic to aconcept that it has the instances it does. (We have, as it were, a correspondencetheory without a theory of correspondence).

As noted, Travis holds that what I say depends on the local contextual interestof my saying. It follows from this, more or less, that someone can know what Isaid only if they can recognise that interest. (It is immediate in any case that anattempt to specify what was said without alluding to some contextual interest willfail to specify a sayable/truth condition at all.) Thus Travis writes that ‘questionsas to what it is I said … [are only] answered by our common parochial sense forwhat ought to be expected of my speaking as I did in the circumstances in whichI did’ (p. 177). From here Travis is drawn on to the thought that this commonparochial sense has work in ‘informing – forming, itself informed by the world asit may be – those things there are for us to judge’ (p. 162). What we think, Travissays, is ‘stamped with our shared sensibilities’ (p. 14). It is not at all easy to arriveat a clear picture of how this stamping is to work. That to one side, however, it ismost important to Travis that the sensibilities are, as he says, parochial, and by thishe means that they are not latent in a subject merely by virtue of that subject’sbeing a thinker. (A Martian thinker might understand the words I used when Iuttered the sentence ‘The meat is on the rug’ and yet be constitutionally incapa-ble of knowing what I said). ‘Our sense’ is a sense contingently shared within ourcommunity.

The suggestion that parochial sensibilities of this kind inform the conceptualimplies a certain disunity to that realm. Our thoughts are not of a piece withMartian thoughts; the conceptual is not structured as Frege imagined in a single,universal logic. This result would seem to carry with it a threat of relativism:Martian reality is not our reality. Travis is keen to see off this threat. He is alsokeen – at length – to avoid any slide from the claim that the content of my utter-ance may be a matter, in part, of the sensibilities of my community, to the idealistposition that the truth of my utterance is determined by those sensibilities. Bothof these threats are to be deflected by Travis’ correspondence theory of truth.

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Whilst the conceptual may involve our parochial sensibilities, truth or falsity isfixed by the state of the non-conceptual – the single reality on which the incom-parable human and Martian ‘thought-worlds’ are both stances. In defending him-self in this way, it however seems to me, Travis opens himself up to a thirdidealist/relativist charge, a charge that what we can say, and indeed know,belongs not to the world but to us. The complaint here is not simply that say-ables/knowables must be ‘out there’, that our capacities for thought must at everytheoretical turn be radically external to what we think – for one might well rejectsuch an idea of externality as incoherent. The complaint is rather that once oneendorses the idea, as Travis does with his notion of a non-conceptual reality, thenanything without similar objectivity will by comparison be subjective. Travisappears at times to consider concerns of something like this kind, but it remainsunclear to me how his two dominant ideas, when put together, can avoid an ide-alism in which what we know is merely ‘our world’, facts born in our community,and not ‘the world’, the world in itself.

These are large issues and Travis obviously has much more to say on themthan can be addressed in a short review. Several further, related matters are alsocovered. With his correspondence theory of truth, for example, goes a rejectionof excluded middle: the non-conceptual might fail to play ball with our thinking.And beside Frege, Wittgenstein and Austin, Putnam also figures large – as doempiricism, psychologism, the argument from illusion and moral relativism. Onall these matters there is very interesting and fruitful discussion with much to belearnt and to be provoked by. So in sum: whilst these papers are difficult and attimes frustrating, they richly reward serious engagement and should be widelyread.

COLIN JOHNSTONUniversity of Stirling

The Waning of Materialism. EDITED BY R. KOONS AND G. BEALER. (Oxford UP,

2010. Pp. xxxi + 490. Price: £62.50 (hardcover), £24.00 (paperback).)

This collection brings together papers by a wide range of authors, united in the viewthat certain serious and persistent problems for materialist theories of mind and selfweigh in favour of anti-materialist alternatives. In an introductory survey, the edi-tors note that materialism seems to face a large number of serious problems com-pared to anti-materialism (hence the alleged waning of the former), which loses outto materialism only on ontological complexity. They speculate that “the very fea-tures that make anti-materialism ontologically more complex than materialismenable it to deal with the various phenomena that materialism finds difficult toaccommodate,” (p. xx). This is somewhat uncharitable. The materialist’s problemsin accommodating phenomena such as intentionality and consciousness stem froma commitment to explaining those phenomena in materialistic terms. Anti-material-ists typically define their position by denying that any such explanations are possi-ble, so it is little wonder they face fewer such problems. Even if the targetphenomena can ultimately be explained in materialistic terms, there is no reason to

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