Grammar in Philosophy

Bede Rundle is a philosopher at Oxford University's Trinity College and the author of several books that explore questions ranging from the nature of perception to the reason for a material world. His first book, Perception, Sensation and Verification, is an investigation and analysis of perception in both the human and animal world. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement felt that this was an "important work [that] breaks new ground in two respects." First, as the reviewer noted, "it develops one version of a novel and powerful theory of meaning adumbrated and named ‘anti-realism’ by M.A.E. Dummett." According to the same reviewer, Perception, Sensation and Verification secondly "relates problems in the philosophy of mind to an explicit semantic theory." Rundle thus attempts in this first book to test the theory of antirealism by exploring how well it can help elucidate various theories of mind. "The whole work is dense with ingenious arguments," continued the Times Literary Supplement critic, "and in toto it is a praiseworthy attempt."
With his 1979 work Grammar in Philosophy, Rundle covers many of the major topics in the philosophy of language, with special emphasis on the concepts of noun and verb phrases as well as numbers and the underlying questions of meaning with which such constructs deal. Peter Geach, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, explained Rundle's program in this work as an attempt "to clarify questions about existence, meaning, facts and truth by appealing to elementary considerations about the syntax and semantics of ordinary language." Geach appeared to be of two minds about Grammar in Philosophy, terming it simultaneously "laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind."