Author:John Searle
In this fascinating, provocative account, eminent philosopher John Searle shows how our everyday actions and cultural knowledge are of a metaphysical complexity that is truely staggering. He explores the charecter of the structures of our daily work that exist by human agreement and from this, the nature of objective reality. For example, how can it be completely objective fact that coins are money, if something is money only because we belive it is money? And what is the role of language constitutiing such facts?
In examining the difference between what can and what cannot be socially constructed, he also shows how biology, which offers facts that are independant of human opinion and is often seen in opposition to the social sciences, forms the basis of these cultural and consititutional forms.
The Scots tongue, like most of the world's minority languages, is under pressure and Billy Kay in this excellent and cogent survey draws together the strands of our concern
—— Daily ExpressKay is the best writer on his own language I have read since Burchfield on English; his book should be put in schools, for it is capably seditious
—— The HeraldMoving, delightful, even inspiring
—— Edinburgh ReviewIt is not the kind of dry academic tome so cherished by linguistic nitpickers, but a bright, radical examination of the language which is at the heart of our existence
—— Aberdeen Press and JournalA fresh and invigorating overview of a fascinating subject
—— Stirling ObserverWell written . . . provocative
—— The New York TimesAttuned to pop culture as well as to scholarship, Abley proves a deft social anthropologist
—— The Daily Telegraph
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