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Facing Facts This page intentionally left blank Facing Facts Stephen Neale CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6 DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen Neale 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence Number CO1P0000148 with the permission of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2007 AH rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-924715-8 Don't say "face facts" to me, ... Everybody keeps saying it just now; but the fact is, it's impossible to face facts. They're like the walls of a room, all around you. If you face one wall, you must have your back to the other three, (E. M. Forster) Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament, (Wallace Stevens) This page intentionally left blank For Haidy This page intentionally left blank Preface At the 1995 meeting of Logic and Language, held at the Univer- sity of London, I gave a talk on something I had been discussing in seminars at Birkbeck College that spring and at the University of California, Berkeley, the previous year: Kurt Godel's "sling- shot" argument and its philosophical implications. I had received so much stimulating and challenging feedback from Herman Cappelen, William Craig, Tirn Crane, Donald Davidson, Josh Dever, Eli Dresner, Marcus Giaquinto, Jim Hopkins, Martin Jones, Ariela Lazar, Jonathan Lebowitsch, Michael Martin, Benson Mates, John Searle, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Scott Stur- geon, Bruce Vermazen, and Jamie Whyte that I was not at all confident I could get across my points convincingly in a one-hour lecture at the conference. My presentation was inevitably compressed, but the main ideas seemed to go over well, mainly because the audience was so well versed in the relevant subject matter. The editor of Mind was present and, perhaps aware of my constitutional inability to send anything to a journal without semi-official encouragement, asked if I would consider writing up my talk for submission, on the off-chance that Mind decided to publish selected proceedings of the conference. I was torn, as I felt I could not do justice to the issues in a journal article and had viewed myself as in the process of writing a book. Several weeks later I aired the main ideas again in lectures at the Universities of Oslo, Stockholm, and Stuttgart, where Jens-Erik Fenstad, Olav Gjelsvik, Soren Haggkvist, Matthias Hogstrom, Hans Kamp, Jonathan Knowles, Per-Martin Lot", Jan-Tore L0nning, Paul Needham, Peter Pagin, Dag Prawitz, Bj0rn Ramberg, and Dag Westerstahl left no symbol unturned. For the following five or six weeks I had the privilege of a residential fellowship at the Rock- efeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, where I was able
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