Table Of ContentFacing Facts
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Facing Facts
Stephen Neale
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ISBN 978-0-19-924715-8
Don't say "face facts" to me, ... Everybody keeps saying it just now; but
the fact is, it's impossible to face facts. They're like the walls of a room, all
around you. If you face one wall, you must have your back to the other
three,
(E. M. Forster)
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament,
(Wallace Stevens)
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For Haidy
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Preface
At the 1995 meeting of Logic and Language, held at the Univer-
sity of London, I gave a talk on something I had been discussing
in seminars at Birkbeck College that spring and at the University
of California, Berkeley, the previous year: Kurt Godel's "sling-
shot" argument and its philosophical implications. I had received
so much stimulating and challenging feedback from Herman
Cappelen, William Craig, Tirn Crane, Donald Davidson, Josh
Dever, Eli Dresner, Marcus Giaquinto, Jim Hopkins, Martin
Jones, Ariela Lazar, Jonathan Lebowitsch, Michael Martin,
Benson Mates, John Searle, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Scott Stur-
geon, Bruce Vermazen, and Jamie Whyte that I was not at all
confident I could get across my points convincingly in a one-hour
lecture at the conference. My presentation was inevitably
compressed, but the main ideas seemed to go over well, mainly
because the audience was so well versed in the relevant subject
matter. The editor of Mind was present and, perhaps aware of my
constitutional inability to send anything to a journal without
semi-official encouragement, asked if I would consider writing up
my talk for submission, on the off-chance that Mind decided to
publish selected proceedings of the conference. I was torn, as I felt
I could not do justice to the issues in a journal article and had
viewed myself as in the process of writing a book. Several weeks
later I aired the main ideas again in lectures at the Universities of
Oslo, Stockholm, and Stuttgart, where Jens-Erik Fenstad, Olav
Gjelsvik, Soren Haggkvist, Matthias Hogstrom, Hans Kamp,
Jonathan Knowles, Per-Martin Lot", Jan-Tore L0nning, Paul
Needham, Peter Pagin, Dag Prawitz, Bj0rn Ramberg, and Dag
Westerstahl left no symbol unturned. For the following five or six
weeks I had the privilege of a residential fellowship at the Rock-
efeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, where I was able
