ABSTRACT
The most challenging of these three contributions is Marcelo Dascal’s. Entitled ‘Adam Smith’s theory of language’, its first paragraph concludes with the caveat that ‘it would be an exaggeration to say that he had a “theory of language” ’ (79). The effect of such a caveat is to raise doubts concerning the fruitfulness of the approach mandated by the essay’s title. Dascal’s essay certainly succeeds in demonstrating the ubiquity, and even the centrality, of ‘language-related topics’ in Smith’s teaching and writing (79). At the same time, one gathers from the essay that Smith has little to offer to contemporary language theorists. The author is himself an eminent student of both this theory and its early modern history, and when he concludes that Smith’s ‘voice in the intensive dialogue that his century sustained on this topic was a relatively minor one’ (103-4), we must defer to his expertise in concluding that Smith’s intrinsic interest to theorists of language (and historians thereof) is minimal.
