ABSTRACT
Introduction to Part II This is the core of the book. Part I sets out certain preliminaries in that I wished to make clear what I meant by philosophy and by science. I hope that my account was sufficiently clear to justify proceeding to my ontological and epistemological commitments (assumptions) in Chapter 3 of Part I.With Part I behind us and a clear commitment to use science to clarify philosophy (the opposite is accepted as long-standing) we now see what help we can get in re-analysing and reconsidering the traditional philosophical problems. These we can think of primarily as meaning and truth. They are obviously closely related to each other and we can treat of them in many ways, and so we do. We move from truth (and “truth acts” to coin a phrase perhaps better called “belief acts”) to meaning (and what might well be called “meaning(ful) acts”) to “speech acts” (already accepted terminology) and to behavioural activity in which truth, meaning and speech are embedded.The first chapter (Chapter 5) on truth is I suppose fairly conventional. The second chapter (Chapter 6) on meaning is an attempt to clear the way for Chapters 7 and 8, which are also concerned with meaning, but with at least a difference of emphasis. One is concerned with semantics (and also indeed a brief incursion into syntax), whereas the last chapter takes us into pragmatics. It is here that lies the very heart of this book. It is not that we cannot abstract from the total behavioural situation in discussing philosophy, logic and mathematics, but in so doing it does, in my view, have the effect of creating many of the so-
called philosophical problems. It is, therefore, my aim to try to see what insights we can get by putting these matters back into their original semantic and behavioural (pragmatic) context.
