Professor Ian Rumfitt

BA, DPhil, FBA
Senior Research Fellow since 2016

My current research is in the philosophy of language. I want to reconsider the general relationship between truth and meaning, a central theme of philosophy from the 1960s until the 1980s, but one which has fallen into abeyance since. My approach is to explicate meaning in terms of its connections with belief and action and then to explain truth in terms of meaning (thereby reversing the predominant order of explanation). This approach casts new light on such diverse topics as the semantic paradoxes and the special characteristics of mathematical discourse.