Once again, van Fraassen has given us an incredibly rich, learned and profound book that will be studied and argued about for decades to come. The book is about scientific representation, but from the perspective of Bas van Fraassen’s empiricism this means ‘‘representation of the empirical phenomena’’ (1). He is keen to distance himself from the empiricist tradition that would interpret the lat...

To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The answer to this question, of course, depends upon the kinds of semiotics that one is talking about. In our article we argue that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches favored by some Postprocessualists are incomplete and advocate an alternative approach inspired by the ‘other father’ of semiotics...

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore’s paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequ...