Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
This is a book written by a philosopher for philosophers; it needs a philosopher to review it properly. A review by a non-philosopher in the pages of a linguistics journal is justified, however, by the fact that the core of the book consists of a series of proposals concerning one of the fundamental questions of lexical semantics: what are we to make of the apparent variability in the meaning of a word from context to context? (This fact is not immediately inferrable from the title.) The present review focuses exclusively on this topic; it should be borne in mind, however, that the author's exposition of his views on word-meaning occurs as part of a more general discussion concerning the nature of analogy, and its role in literary, religious and legal discourse.