Languages Of Truth

From “Best of the Booker” winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture. Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, including several never previously in print, Languages of Truth chronicles a period of momentous cultural shifts. Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, Rushdie shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison, and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Always attuned to the malleability of language, Rushdie considers the nature of truth, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. Written with the author’s signature wit and energy, Languages of Truth offers pleasure and insight in equal measure, confirming Rushdie’s place as one of the most original and important thinkers of our time.

Here for the first time is an account of the inner lives of teachers during and immediately after the pandemic lockdown. What is teaching like during a pandemic? How did teachers manage their emotional lives as colleagues became infected, hospitalised, and died? What did teachers actually do to bridge the gap in teaching and learning where schools and homes lacked electronic resources? These are amongst the many questions on which this collection of teacher stories sheds light. Most of these are stories of hope, resilience, and enormous courage in the face of a deadly virus. Your faith in teachers and teaching will be restored after reading this book.

"A delightful book … I should like to have written it myself." — Bertrand Russell First published in 1936, this first full-length presentation in English of the Logical Positivism of Carnap, Neurath, and others has gone through many printings to become a classic of thought and communication. It not only surveys one of the most important areas of modern thought; it also shows the confusion that arises from imperfect understanding of the uses of language. A first-rate antidote for fuzzy thought and muddled writing, this remarkable book has helped philosophers, writers, speakers, teachers, students, and general readers alike. Mr. Ayers sets up specific tests by which you can easily evaluate statements of ideas. You will also learn how to distinguish ideas that cannot be verified by experience — those expressing religious, moral, or aesthetic experience, those expounding theological or metaphysical doctrine, and those dealing with a priori truth. The basic thesis of this work is that philosophy should not squander its energies upon the unknowable, but should perform its proper function in criticism and analysis.

Background to the problem -- The Rubicon -- Language as miracle -- Language and natural selection -- The mental prerequisites -- Thinking without language -- Mind reading -- Stories -- Constructing language -- Hands on to language -- Finding voice -- How language is structured -- Over the Rubicon

A linguist’s entertaining and highly informed guide to what languages are and how they function. Think you know language? Think again. There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present. The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents. Swear words are produced in a special part of your brain. Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic knowledge. Linguists can now explain how and why language changes, describe its structures, and map its activity in the brain. But despite these advances, much of what people believe about language is based on folklore, instinct, or hearsay. We imagine a word’s origin is it’s “true” meaning, that foreign languages are full of “untranslatable” words, or that grammatical mistakes undermine English. In Don’t Believe A Word, linguist David Shariatmadari takes us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, urging us to abandon our prejudices in a bid to uncover the (far more interesting) truth about what we do with words. Exploding nine widely held myths about language while introducing us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics, Shariatmadari is an energetic guide to the beauty and quirkiness of humanity’s greatest achievement.

Truth in Many Tongues examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity. Considering policies and strategies exerted within the Iberian Peninsula and the New World during the sixteenth century, this book challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization. Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler investigates the subtle and surprising ways that Spanish monarchs and churchmen thought about language. Drawing from inquisition reports and letters; royal and ecclesiastical correspondence; records of church assemblies, councils, and synods; and printed books in a variety of genres and languages, he shows that Church and Crown officials had no single, unified policy either for Castilian or for other languages. They restricted Arabic in some contexts but not in others. They advocated using Amerindian languages, though not in all cases. And they thought about language in ways that modern categories cannot explain: they were neither liberal nor conservative, neither tolerant nor intolerant. In fact, Wasserman-Soler argues, they did not think predominantly in terms of accommodation or assimilation, categories that are common in contemporary scholarship on religious missions. Rather, their actions reveal a highly practical mentality, as they considered each context carefully before deciding what would bring more souls into the Catholic Church. Based upon original sources from more than thirty libraries and archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, England, and Mexico, Truth in Many Tongues will fascinate students and scholars who specialize in early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, Christian-Muslim relations, and early modern Catholicism.

This book provides a detailed commentary on the classic monograph by Alfred Tarski, and offers a reinterpretation and retranslation of the work using the original Polish text and the English and German translations. In the original work, Tarski presents a method for constructing definitions of truth for classical, quantificational formal languages. Furthermore, using the defined notion of truth, he demonstrates that it is possible to provide intuitively adequate definitions of the semantic notions of definability and denotation and that the notion in a structure can be defined in a way that is analogous to that used to define truth. Tarski’s piece is considered to be one of the major contributions to logic, semantics, and epistemology in the 20th century. However, the author points out that some mistakes were introduced into the text when it was translated into German in 1935. As the 1956 English version of the work was translated from the German text, those discrepancies were carried over in addition to new mistakes. The author has painstakingly compared the three texts, sentence-by-sentence, highlighting the inaccurate translations, offering explanations as to how they came about, and commenting on how they have influenced the content and suggesting a correct interpretation of certain passages. Furthermore, the author thoroughly examines Tarski’s article, offering interpretations and comments on the work.

From one of the great novelists of our day, a vital, brilliant new book of essays, speeches and articles essential for our times. Step Across This Line showcases the other side of one of fiction’s most astonishing conjurors. On display is Salman Rushdie’s incisive, thoughtful and generous mind, in prose that is as entertaining as it is topical. The world is here, captured in pieces on a dazzling array of subjects: from New York’s Amadou Diallo case to the Wizard of Oz, from U2 to fifty years of Indian writing, from a tribute to Angela Carter to the struggle to film Midnight’s Children. The title essay was originally delivered at Yale as the 2002 Tanner lecture on human values, and examines the changing meaning of frontiers in the modern world -- moral and metaphorical frontiers as well as physical ones. The collection chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual journeys, but it is also an intimate invitation into his life: he explores his relationship to India through a moving diary of his first visit there in over a decade, “A Dream of Glorious Return.” Step Across This Line also includes “Messages From the Plague Years,” a historic set of letters, articles and reflections on life under the fatwa. Gathered together for the first time, this is Rushdie’s humane, intelligent and angry response to a grotesque threat, aimed not just at him but at free expression itself. Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie’s first collection of non-fiction in a decade, has the same energy, imagination and erudition as his astounding novels -- along with some very strong opinions.