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entertain this possibility. A question that remains for the present reviewer ishow Cottinghams openness to it connects with his some of his more scepticalremarks about an interventionist God.

When it applies its sharp, thin, simple instruments to anything profound,analytical philosophy can get very Procrustean. Its ways and procedures can bedistressingly reminiscent of 1980s Thatcherite accounting methods: anythingcomplex and difficult and deep wont show up on the balance sheet, so isntcounted in, so doesnt count at all. One thinks, for instance, of the amazingdifficulties that analytical philosophers get into when they try and explainwhat is wrong with killing. There is, in a way, almost too much to say about aquestion like that. But a lot of it is so much a part of our framework for think-ing, rather than of our explicit thought, that it can prove extremely hard toarticulate. (Another way of misrepresenting the shape of the issue is to thinkthat there must be just one proposition that fully and definitively captures whatis wrong with killing: this too, unfortunately, is a very natural assumption foranalytic philosophers.) Just this sort of tin-earedness to what is really impor-tant in religious practice, as it actually happens, is the bane of contemporaryanalytic philosophy of religion; much of what goes on will remind any practis-ing believer of a debate about whether music exists conducted entirely by deaf(and/or tone-deaf) people. One of the best things about Cottinghams book isthat he not only avoids the traps of superficiality and tin-earedness himself,but also offers ways out of those traps for the rest of us. If his book succeeds inwaking only a few philosophical atheists from their dogmatic slumbers, thatwill be a fine achievement; and I imagine it will do a good deal more than that.

Department of Philosophy timothy chappellFaculty of ArtsThe Open UniversityWalton HallMilton Keynes, MK7 6AAUKt.chappell@open.ac.ukdoi:10.1093/mind/fzm743

Bare Facts and Naked Truths: A New Correspondence Theoryof Truth, by George Englebretsen. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. x + 194.H/b 45.00.

Correspondence theorists of truth claim that a truthbearer is true if and only ifthere is a fact to which it corresponds. The usual objections they face are thatfact and correspondence have not been clearly explained. Englebretsens goalis to rehabilitate the correspondence theory by producing a version of it thatavoids these problems.

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Englebretsen claims, without argument, that any decent theory of truthmust be based on a semantic theory: theorists of truth should explain why ourassertions have the truth-conditions they do (p. 87). Where other philosopherswould use predicate calculus, Englebretsen uses an alternative, neo-Aristote-lian system of formal logic called terminism, deriving from Fred Sommersswork. I lack the space to explain the system here, but luckily Englebretsensmain points can be conveyed without its help.

To explain what the English word wise means, Englebretsen invokes threesemantic relations. Wise, on his view, expresses the concept of wisdom, signi-fies the property of wisdom, and denotes all individuals in the domain of dis-course that have the property of wisdom. Here, concepts are understood asabstract intensional objects which can exist whether or not they have anyinstances, whereas properties, on Englebretsens view, cannot exist unless theyare instantiated. Thus unicorn expresses the concept of being a unicorn butfails to signify any property.

Englebretsen extends this story to assertions. Assertions expresses proposi-tions: the assertion that p expresses the proposition that p. They signify proper-ties of the domain: for instance, the assertion that some people are wiseexpresses the property of containing wise people. Englebretsen calls these con-stitutive properties. Finally, Englebretsen claims, assertions denote theirdomains.

This semantic theory enables Englebretsen to explain what he means byfact when putting forward his correspondence theory: facts are constitutiveproperties. Thus the fact that corresponds to the (true) proposition that thereare wise people is the property of containing a wise person. Englebretsen saysthat the fact makes the proposition true. Unlike some other theories of truth-making, this story can easily be extended to the negative propositions, such asthat there are no unicorns. What makes this true is the property of not contain-ing a unicorn.

Before putting forward his theory, Englebretsen devotes the first half of thebook to a historical survey of accounts of truth, which includes an interestingdiscussion of some scholastic theories. After putting his theory forward, Eng-lebretsen considers how it meshes with epistemology, and then a short finalchapter addresses the Liar; both these discussions lean heavily on Sommers.

My main worry about this book concerns its overall strategy. Englebretsenwrites that the correspondence theory has always been the one most appealingto science and to a common-sense view of the world; the main reason for giv-ing up on the correspondence account of truth (and searching for an alterna-tive) has been the perception that any version of correspondence is deeplyflawed (p. 76). The correspondence theory, then, is the default view: once wehave been given a version of it that meets the usual challenges, we will have noreason to give up on the theory. Why does Englebretsen think that the corre-spondence theory has this status?

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My worry is that Englebretsen regards the correspondence theory as thedefault because he conflates it with some quite distinct and more obviousclaims. Consider the following passage:

Aristotle spelled out more explicitly the idea that truth or falsity is determined bythe way things are. This classical realist theory of truth has become known as the cor-respondence theory of truth. (p. 11)

This is mistaken. It is immensely appealing to think that whether a truthbeareris true depends on how things are. But there is a deep logical crevasse separat-ing this from the claim that for a truthbearer to be true there must be a fact towhich it corresponds. (See also p. 4 and p. 119 for similar conflations.)

Reading Englebretsen, one gets the impression that the correspondence the-ory of truth has been generally popular since antiquity and has only recentlylost support. On the contrary: in historical perspective, the correspondencetheory is a recent innovation. As Wolfgang Knne has written: It was in about1910 in Cambridge that G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell married corre-spondence with fact (Conceptions of Truth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003,p. 112; Knne dates the betrothal of these two notions to the late nineteenthcentury). I suspect that this mistake is another result of confusing the corre-spondence theory with less contentious doctrines.

There are several intuitions that might be regarded as providing support forthe correspondence theory; the idea that whether a truthbearer is true dependson how things are is just one of these. Another is the idea that truths must, insome sense, correspond to reality. Given Englebretsens argumentative strat-egy, I would have expected him to discuss the work of those opponents of thecorrespondence theory who claim that their own rival views can accommodatethese intuitions. For instance, Paul Horwich argues that that there is room forthem in his minimalist account of truth (Truth, 2nd edn., Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1998, Ch. 7). And many philosophers have argued that a Tarskian refer-ential semantics does these intuitions full justiceto give just one example,Ian McFetridge, in his neglected Truth, Correspondence, Explanation andKnowledge (in his Logical Necessity and Other Essays, London: AristotelianSociety Series, Vol. 11, 1990). The lack of any engagement with these argumentsis a serious weakness of the book.

Englebretsen repeatedly considers the following objection to correspond-ence theories, suggested by Strawson: although there are facts, they are not inthe world (pp. 120, 130, 133, 135). I was unsure what Englebretsen meant by inthe world, though some light is shed on the matter by Englebretsens claimthat the problem is solved by his doctrine that facts are properties, rather thanparticulars (pp. 120, 1223, 130). If there are facts, perhaps we should ask: towhich ontological category do they belong? But the more fundamental ques-tion about facts is: do we have any reason to believe in them at all?

There are several other weaknesses. The historical survey is sometimesmarred by excessive use of quotation; the discussion of Davidson on pp. 5662is a case in point. The exposition of terminist logic (pp. 7987) is confusingly

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quick. On p. 134, Englebretsen claims that Lewis and Rosen think that theentire world (just as it is) is the truth-maker for all truths and that there is butone truth; he has misread them. Furthermore, Englebretsen is too fond ofdigressions for my taste: the exposition of terminism, for instance, is impededby a polemic against social constructivism (pp. 945) and by comments onDavid Armstrongs views (pp. 8890, 1035).

Englebretsen has taken unusual care to make this book as enjoyable as pos-sible. At the start of each chapter and each sub-section there is a string ofepigraphs mostly quotations about truth, from philosophers and fromGroucho Marx, Oscar Wilde, and other wits. Chapter and section headings areconsistently light-hearted: for instance, a section on Tarskis material ade-quacy condition is headed The Big MAC Attack. The title of the book alludesto a remark of Bradleys (quoted on p. 107): There are those who so dislike thenude that they find something indecent in the naked truth. It is, perhaps, mis-leading, since there is nothing particularly nudist about Englebretsensalethiology.

Philosophy david ligginsSchool of Social SciencesUniversity of ManchesterManchesterM13 9PLUKdoi:10.1093/mind/fzm746

The Primacy of the Subjective: Foundations for a Unified Theoryof Mind and Language, by Nicholas Georgalis. Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2006. Pp. 336. H/b $36.00, 23.95.

This book may well be the most original treatment of intentionality, represen-tation, and content to have appeared in the past decade. If its prose and orga-nization leave something to be desired, the reader is amply compensated bythe novelty and substance of its main theses, as well as their spirited defense.Moreover, in an age that sees much work on relatively minor ripples in alreadyfamiliar and well charted debates, it is refreshing to encounter an attempt toarticulate a grand picture that ties mind, meaning, reference, intentionality,and consciousness in one cohesive and rich outlookand such an originaloutlook no less. With this book, Georgalis joins a number of philosophers whohave recently argued for the primacy of subjective conscious awareness in thetheory of contentJohn Searle, Terence Horgan and collaborators, GalenStrawson, and Colin McGinn come to mindbut goes probably farther thanall in eschewing the naturalist-externalist orthodoxy on content and articulat-ing an alternative picture that works its way from the inside out.