An Acquaintance With Description

Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding enjoyed a fascinating if brief three-year friendship via correspondence between 1927 and 1930, and in A Description of Acquaintance, Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm make the letters available to a larger audience for the first time. Riding and Stein are important figures in twentieth-century poetry and poetics and are considered progenitors of later movements such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. The editors contextualize their relationship and its time period with an introduction; annotations to the letters; and supplementary materials, including pieces by Stein and Riding that exemplify their singular perspectives on modernism as well as their personal poetics. The book provides unique insight into Stein's and Riding's writing processes as well as the larger literary world around them, making it a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry.

A new approach to the definition of scientific explanation. Unlike standard theories, it focuses initially on the explaining act itself, to which reference must be made in order to understand what an explanation is and how it can be evaluated in the sciences.

Accuracy in judging personality is important in clinical assessment, applied settings, and everyday life. Personality judgments are important in assessing job candidates, choosing friends, and determining who we can trust and rely on in our personal lives. Thus, the accuracy of those judgments is important to both individuals and organizations. In examining personality judgment, Personality Judgment takes a sweeping look at the field's history, assumptions, and current research findings. The book explores the construct of traits within the person-situation debate, defends the human judge in the face of the fundamental attribution error, and discusses research on four categories of moderators in judgment: the good judge, the judgeable target, the trait being judged, and the information on which the judgment is based. Spanning two decades of accuracy research, this book makes clear not only how personality judgment has come to its current standing but also where it may move in the future. Covers 20 years worth of historical, current and future trends in personality judgment Includes discussions of debatable issues related to accuracy and error. The author is well known for his recently developed theoy of the process by which one person may render an accurate judgment of the personality traits of another

Bertrand Russell famously distinguished between "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description". For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, many philosophers viewed the notion of acquaintance with suspicion, associating it with Russellian ideas that they would wish toreject. However in the past decade or two the concept has undergone a striking revival in mainstream "analytic" philosophy - acquaintance is, it seems, respectable again. This volume showcases the great variety of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language for whichphilosophers are currently employing the notion of acquaintance. It is the first collection of new essays devoted to the topic of acquaintance, featuring chapters from many of the world's leading experts in this area. Opening with an extensive introductory essay, which provides some historicalbackground and summarizes the main debates and issues concerning acquaintance, the remaining thirteen contributions are grouped thematically into four sections: phenomenal consciousness, perceptual experience, reference, and epistemology.

Reference is a central topic in philosophy of language, and has been the main focus of discussion about how language relates to the world. R. M. Sainsbury sets out a new approach to the concept, which promises to bring to an end some long-standing debates in semantic theory. There is a single category of referring expressions, all of which deserve essentially the same kind of semantic treatment. Included in this category are both singular and plural referring expressions ('Aristotle', 'The Pleiades'), complex and non-complex referring expressions ('The President of the USA in 1970', 'Nixon'), and empty and non-empty referring expressions ('Vulcan', 'Neptune'). Referring expressions are to be described semantically by a reference condition, rather than by being associated with a referent. In arguing for these theses, Sainsbury's book promises to end the fruitless oscillation between Millian and descriptivist views. Millian views insist that every name has a referent, and find it hard to give a good account of names which appear not to have referents, or at least are not known to do so, like ones introduced through error ('Vulcan'), ones where it is disputed whether they have a bearer ('Patanjali') and ones used in fiction. Descriptivist theories require that each name be associated with some body of information. These theories fly in the face of the fact names are useful precisely because there is often no overlap of information among speakers and hearers. The alternative position for which the book argues is firmly non-descriptivist, though it also does not require a referent. A much broader view can be taken of which expressions are referring expressions: not just names and pronouns used demonstratively, but also some complex expressions and some anaphoric uses of pronouns. Sainsbury's approach brings reference into line with truth: no one would think that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth value, but it is commonly held that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth condition, a condition which an arbitrary state of the world would have to satisfy in order to make the sentence true. The right analogy is that a semantic theory should associate a referring expression with a reference condition, a condition which an arbitrary object would have to satisfy in order to be the expression's referent. Lucid and accessible, and written with a minimum of technicality, Sainsbury's book also includes a useful historical survey. It will be of interest to those working in logic, mind, and metaphysics as well as essential reading for philosophers of language.