1 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle: Open Court 1986), 80; J. Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1968), 75; G. Sampson, Schools of Linguistics (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1980), 48

2 Roy Harris, Reading Saussure (La Salle: Open Court 1987), 5

3 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 76b

4 Saussure, Course, 10, 13-15, 113

5 Saussure, Course, 14, 80. Although Saussure discusses a ‘linguistics of parole’ (18-20), it is entirely unclear what this can mean on his principles. Also, he appears to expect everything that belongs to the heterogeneous ensemble of langage to fall into one or the other of the dichotomous categories of langue and parole, yet he is entirely unclear about how one is supposed to tell to which category a given phenomenon (e.g., syntax) belongs. See David Holdcroft, Saussure: Signs, System, and Arbitrariness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), Ch. 2

6 N. Chomsky, Language and Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972), 115; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1965), 8

7 Chomsky, Aspects, 3-4

8 Many of my citations from Bakhtin's largely untranslated writings come from the abundant quotations in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984). Citations from this source are parenthetically embedded as T. Citations from V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986 [1929]) are parenthetically embedded as V. It is widely assumed that Bakhtin is the author of this work.

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 202. This is no less true of words like ‘and,’ ‘there is,’ or ‘not’ than ‘truth,’ ‘freedom,’ or ‘love.’ If we have learned anything from Quine on analytic and synthetic, these are differences of degree and do not indicate a pure structure of ahistorical, unrevisable ‘logical constants’ useful merely for combining names and predicates. Volosinov remarks, ‘syntactic forms … have arisen and taken shape only in accordance with the governing tendencies of speech reception; on the other hand, once these patterns have assumed shape and function in the language, they in tum exert an influence, regulating or inhibiting in their development, on the tendencies of an evaluative reception that operate within the channel prescribed by the existing forms’ (V.117-18).

10 M. Oakeshott, ‘Historical Events,’ On History and Other Essays (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble 1983), 67, 95; R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1945), 12-13; Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977), 46

11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell 1967), §§66, 108

12 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel,’ The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981), 291

13 Roy Harris, The Language Machine (London: Duckworth 1987), 122

14 The citations from Barere, Gregoire, and Meillet are in R. Breton, Geolinguistics (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1991), 70-2. Breton observes that since the latter eighteenth century ‘most states began to emphasize the necessity of a common language as a cohesive, solidary force … [and] to wipe out all linguistic expression distinct from that of the central power. It was a case of simple effacement of all persistence of any regional ethnic personality that differed from the national archetype, all under the guise of ease of communication by means of one language …. Patriotism was redefined as maximal monolingualism, which excluded everything that did not conform to a national image, propelled by one language …. [The] goal of linguistic homogeneity of large masses of the population is … accompanied usually by a policy of special treatment for a certain language, exploitation of nationalistic feelings, and, in most cases, control of the language of the school system …. Failure to teach the ethnic language is essential in such strategies, because … to not teach a language is to kill it, especially if one teaches another in its place’ (69-72).

15 Andre Martinet, Elemrnts of Grneral Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 15

16 Roy Harris underscores the singular role of the dictionary, unknown to antiquity but dating from early modem times: ‘The vernacular dictionary, when it eventually appeared in Europe, was essentially a product of the rise of nationalism, which gave birth also to the serious study of the grammar of the modem European languages …. [It] bypassed the major dialect differences which still divided speech, and thus contributed simultaneously to the ideal and to the reality of national linguistic unity … [becoming] an integral part of an equation between linguistic unity and socio-political unity …. [By] exhibiting each word as an established item with its own identity, the dictionary effectively discouraged its users from seeing a language as consisting in a form of continuous activity … [and] encouraged the view that “the language” was a specific, identifiable system of words, and moreover that it was a closed system …. A language thus came to be seen as constituting, in principle, a finite system of elements at any given time, and the psychological foundation was laid for all modem forms of structuralism’ (The Language Makers [Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980], 128-33).

17 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press 1980), 65-9

18 W.V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row 1961), 20

19 Donald Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,’ Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 194

20 Davidson, Inquiries, 43-4. I take him to be speaking generally of the occasional truth-value (true/false). Quine makes much the same point: ‘Truth cannot on the whole be viewed as a trait, even a passing trait, of a sentence merely; it is a passing trait of a sentence for a man’ (Word and Object [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1960], 191).

21 Davidson insists on this: ‘an action counts as linguistic only if literal meaning is relevant. But where meaning is relevant, there is always an ulterior purpose … one must always intend to produce some non-linguistic effect through having one's words interpreted’ (Inquiries, 272).

22 A good deal more has to be said even adequately to define this idea of ‘passing for true,’ to say nothing of justifying its systematic use. See my Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993), Ch. 8.

23 I elaborate on the historical and philosophical relationship between truth and the good in my paper, ‘Nietzsche's Question, What Good is Truth?’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992) 225-40.

24 I discuss this point further in my paper ‘Government in Foucault,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991) 421-40.

25 Donald Davidson, ‘The Structure and Content of Truth,’ Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), 302

26 See Paul Horwich, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell1990), Ch. 7. I discuss the historical origin of this so-called intuition and show why it has no validity in Truth in Philosophy, Ch. 1.

27 Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1936), 236

28 Davidson, ‘Structure and Content,’ 302-3

29 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1978), 112

30 Gilson, Medieval Philosophy, 236-7; Augustine, Sermons 306, 9.

31 Davidson, ‘Structure and Content,’ 303-4

32 See G. Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference,’ Philosophical Writings of Frege, P. Geach and M. Black, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell1977), esp. 62-5.

33 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 19

34 Wittgenstein posits a ‘situation’ (Sachlage) in logical space corresponding to every proposition (true or false), and understands the true proposition as one that depicts a fact or actual situation, but he does not make these situations (or anything else) the Bedeutungen of propositions. Frege's idea of a reference for true/false sentences may, however, be a late contribution to a certain countertradition in the history of logic. Something like this may be implied in the Stoic idea of a ‘complete’ lekton, while within Ockham's circle there were those who defended a significatio for the entire proposition. Adam Wodeham, for instance, proposed a complexe significabile for the true/ false sentence, yet he explicitly held that it is not a being. Stoics said the same about lekta. I am grateful to Calvin Normore for our discussion of these references. For Buridan's objection to Wodeham, see Peter King, fohn Buridan's Logic (Dordrecht: D. Reidel1985).

35 SeeP. Boehner, ‘Ockham's Theory of Supposition and the Notion of Truth,’ Collected Articles on Ockham (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute 1958); M.M. Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1987), 390; and Suarez, On the Essence of Finite Being as Such, on the Existence of that Essence, and Their Distinction, trans. N.J. Wells (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 1983) XII.26. The citation from Aristotle is Metaphysics 1051b.

36 Jonathan Ree traces this indifference to philosophes- Voltaire and D'Alembert, Hume and Smith - for whom ‘the history of philosophy’ was the pointless warring of dogmatic schools. See ‘Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,’ in Ree, et al., Philosophy and Its Past (Sussex: Harvester Press 1978).

37 Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul1968). A recent contribution to analytic philosophy of language (formerly its most vibrant specialization) ends on this note: ‘I do not know how to give an interesting answer to the challenge to say what I do for a living. I do not know how to define myself professionally …. Maybe the answer lies in some alliance with cognitive science’ (Steven Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987], 271).

38 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982), 223-4; Foucault, ‘Truth, Power, Self,’ in L.H. Martin, eta!. eds., Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988), 13

39 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon 1985), 8-9