In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is [...]

On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own internal world - of one's current thoughts and feelings - is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we can move beyond this knowledge, how we can form a conception of an objective world,[...]

It seems reasonable to believe that there might have existed things other than those that in fact exist, or have existed. But how should we understand such claims? Standard semantic theories exploit the Leibnizian metaphor of a set of all possible worlds: a proposition might or must be true if it is[...]