In the world of practical affairs the rights of individuals and the prerogatives of communities often lie in tension. Collectives pursue cultural aims at the expense of the minorities in their midst. Individuals assert their freedoms and deploy their wealth in ways that are inimical to the public interest. There is not one country in the world where some variation of this theme is not being played out. Recognizable communities clash with individuals, just as surely as other individuals do.

Whatever disagreements analysts of indexical expressions may have, there is nearly universal agreement that the referents of utterances of ‘I,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now’ are, respectively, the utterer, the place of utterance, and the time of utterance. This seems to lead to the result that utterances of ‘I am here now’ are always true (or, if you like, true at the time of utterance). While they do not express necessary truths — no one is essentially at any particular place at any particular time — it looks like they should necessarily express truths; in this, ‘I am here now’ seems to resemble ‘I exist’. And we are sometimes aware of this sort of vacuity in these utterances; the theoretical result meshes well with our everyday experience.

The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (hereafter LL) which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science literature. It is in the form of field notes by an ‘anthropologist in the lab.’ This may seem an odd place for an anthropologist, but Latour finds his presence easy to justify. ‘Whereas we have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists … ’ (LL, 17).

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: (1) propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and (2) the representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language.

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.