The Editor's Department

THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT In 1991, at my request, the LSA Executive Committee established a new committee, called the Language Editorial Advisory Committee, whose mission it is to 'monitor the editorial conduct of the journal and provide advice to the Editor, as needed, about editorial policies and their implementation. The Committee will also deal with any complaints about the Editor's conduct that come to the LSA.' As Editor, I welcome comments and criticism, whether they are sent directly to me or to the LSA. I try hard to be fair to all authors, but I am well aware that my judgment is not perfect, and that I will inevitably make mistakes. It is therefore important for readers ?? Language to know that comments and complaints about the editorial conduct of the journal can be sent to the new committee in care of the LSA Secretariat: Linguistic Society of America ; 1325 18th St., N.W., Suite 211; Washington, D.C. 20036-6501. CORRECTION: J.M. Moravcsik (Stanford University) has sent the following correction to a Book Notice in Language 68/1: Paul Saka, reviewing my book Thought and language (Routledge, 1990), fails to provide an adequate characterization ofthe book's contents. I wish to correct the record by providing a brief synopsis here. Covering a lot of territory in a book on the philosophy of language is by itself neither a virtue nor a vice. One good reason for wide coverage is the articulation of a new underlying conception of human cognition that then motivates a series of proposals in ontology, theories of the mind, and semantics. My book has this structure. It challenges the widespread conception of humans as primarily belief-forming and information -gathering creatures. Within that conception belief is fundamental, and other more complex cognitive motivations are built up from beliefs and their logical relations. The new conception proposed in the book is that of humans as basically explanation-seeking and explanation-forming creatures. The notion of explanation is fundamental, and notions like those of concept and belief are derivative. This unifying theme leads to proposals in ontology, theory of mind, and semantics. Since explanations are intensional in character, a defense ofa realist ontology is needed. Two new arguments are presented in the book defending a realist ontology. Since explanations have resisted behavioral or functionalist accounts, a challenge to currently fashionable views of the mind is called for. Finally, it is to be shown how this different conception affects lexical semantics. My lexical theory is the heart of the set of new proposals and arguments contained in the book. The intuitive gist of the theory is that meanings are explanatory schemata, and that they lead to an intermediate level of semantics that has remained up till now unacknowledged. Reference and denotation are, then, fixed on a third level. This tripartite conception is independent of various aspects of indexicality. Accounts of those features need to be added to the lexical structure articulated by the theory. The motivations for the theory are clearly stated in Ch. 6, where I show how this theory can account for puzzling cases of seeming ambiguity, cases that 871 872LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4 (1992) have been discussed for some time in the linguistic literature; I also show how the theory provides a basis for linking semantics with syntax. For example, the semantic structures proposed give a clear criterion for determining the number of argument places that are semantically required by various lexical items. The meanings posited by the theory are equivalent to concepts and thus, I argue, should have psychological implications. The empirical implications, moreover, make it clear what kind of evidence would count as disconfirmation. ...