语义外在论是心灵哲学和语言哲学中最受关注也是最困难的主题之一，对我们理解社会制度和物理环境对语言和心灵的影响具有非常重要的意义。本书首先深入介绍了描述主义和指称主义的各种理论版本，尤其是对弗雷格和克里普克的相关理论做了重点的考察，随后讨论了语义外在论在研究索引性思想、认识论的怀疑论、自我知识和心灵因果关系等重大论题中的核心作用，书中对普特南的“孪生地球”论证、伯奇的“关节炎”论证和戴维森的“沼泽人”论证等著名的论证做了精彩的分析。本书内容丰富，介绍和探讨了大量名家关于语义外在论的文献，对该主题的研究提供了一份极其宝贵的“地图”.

'An excellent and very welcome guide to psycholinguistics...highly recommended.' The Washington Post 'The reader's curiosity about the complexities of the mother tongue is kept right to the end.' The times Educational supplement 'This is an excellent text which would give the undergraduate student as fine an introduction to the field of psycholinguistics as is available today.' Choice This concise and readable introduction to psycholinguistics requires on prior knowledge of the subject. Jean aitchison addresses key questions such as: Is language restricted to humans? Is there biologica evidence for innate language capacity? How do children learn language? How do we understand and produce speech? This widley used and highly successful book has been extensively revised. In this 4th edition, Jean Aitchison covers new work on 'talking animals', on language and the brain, on child language, and speech understanding. She also discusses the pros and cons of Chomsky's recent ideas. As a result, several chapters of the book have been largely rewritten, and new references have been added throughout. 作者简介： Jean Aitchison is the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and communication at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow at Worcester College. Her other publications include Words in the Mind (2nd edn 1994)and The Seeds of speech(1996). She gave the 1996 BBC Reith lectures on 'the language web', also now published as a book(1997).