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Review of Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays, by Brian Loar. Edited by K. Balog and S. Beardman. 2017. New York: Oxford University Press. 330pp.

This is an excellent book. It draws together fifteen of Brian Loar’s previously published essays. It is divided into sections on the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. The volume also contains extremely helpful introductions by Stephen Schiffer (on language) and Katalin Balog (on mind). Many of the essays in the volume are from publications that are difficult to track down, so this volume provides a new (and wonderful) opportunity to gain a complete image of Loar’s worldview. The ideas in the essays all mesh systematically with each other. I will try to give an impression of the big picture by grouping the essays by theme, rather than chronology. It must be admitted that some of the essays are challenging to read. However, this is more an artefact of Loar’s thoroughness than any kind of style deficiency. For example, ‘The Semantics of Singular Terms’ (ch.3) draws together issues about singular terms, referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, and conversational score. Not content to give the bare bones of the theory, Loar elaborates the view by applying it to modal contexts (pp.62–63) and responds to Kripkean arguments against descriptivist views of reference (pp.63–66). As Loar says, the ‘account is no more complex than the facts’ (p.59). Indeed, Loar’s thoroughness often makes the issues easier to grasp. Before reading this book, I had never been able to understand Dummett’s views on realism. In ‘Truth beyond all Verification’ (ch.6), Loar explains Dummett’s project with admirable clarity, laying out knotty issues such as the link between realism and the law of bivalence. He then considers in great detail two realist responses, before offering his own. ‘Reference and Propositional Attitudes’ (ch.1) concerns the fact that substitution of co-referring terms in propositional attitude ascriptions can change the truth-value of the ascription. Loar suggests that the problem can be solved by invoking Quine’s analysis of sentences such as ‘Giorgione was so called because of his size’.