It is often said that human beings have the ability to plan and choose what to do, can think for themselves and have the freedom and the right to form their own opinions on moral questions. Such claims are sometimes expressed by saying that the human agent is autonomous. In this paper we shall try to disentangle various theses about the autonomy of the agent which the common claims do not always distinguish.

Can we refer to objects which do not exist? Searle says that we cannot. He postulates an ‘axiom of existence’ such that, if an object does not exist, we cannot refer to it. This ‘axiom of existence’ could be taken simply as a way of defining the notion of ‘reference’; we would not count a reference to a non-existent object as a ‘reference’ in the philosophical sense; or perhaps it might count as a reference but not as a ‘successful’ or ‘consummated’ reference, to use the terminology which Searle sometimes adopts. Whichever way we take Searle's doctrine I wish to argue that it is objectionable. The conceptual scheme he advocates obscures the truth. But I do not deny that there is a temptation to resort to it, and I hope to show that, where lawyers have yielded to the temptation, pernicious doctrines have resulted.

An obligation may take either of two forms, each form being reported in a different way. For example, when we report the obligation of parents to care for their children, if it is the moral obligation we mean, we will say ‘Parents ought to look after their children’ but if we mean the legal obligation, we will say ‘Parents have to look after their children’. The law specifies that people shall do thus and so, not that they ought to do thus and so.

Fiction has been of concern to both the aesthetician and the ontologist. The former is concerned with the criteria or standards by which we judge the aesthetic worth of a fictional work, the latter with whether our ontology must be enlarged to include possible or imaginary worlds in which are housed the characters and incidents referred to and depicted in such works. This is a paper on the ontology of fiction. It will attempt to answer these ontological questions concerning truth and reference in fiction by clarifying the use of language. Our paradigm case of the fictive use of language will be one in which the story-teller orally relates the fictional story in the presence of his audience, rather than one in which he inscribes his story so that it may be read at a later date. The value of considering the use of language in a face-to-face situation is that it brings before us in their full explicitness all of the different facets of a speech act, many of which often lie dormant in non-face-to-face uses and therefore are hard to discover from a consideration of such uses.

Kant's system of Transcendental Idealism may be regarded, in the contemporary philosophical perspective, as concerned with the problem whether any linguistic or conceptual system can be regarded as adequately explained in terms of the facts which the system organises. ‘Transcendental’ may be understood as what is ‘non-reducible’. Kant seems to hold that a linguistic scheme cannot be reduced to the facts which fall within the scheme, and thus it is transcendental to those facts. Formulated in such terms, the Kantian doctrine does not, apparently, propound anything which is new; that facts are tailored to a linguistic scheme is pretty much a well-known doctrine these days. But then, as we shall see, it does say something new; and when we extract that novel element in it, we shall discover also the positive import in the Kantian term, ‘Transcendental’.