Description From The Author: During the years in which "Higher Lessons" has been in existence, we have ourselves had an instructive experience with it in the classroom. We have considered hundreds of suggestive letters written us by intelligent teachers using the book. We have examined the best works on grammar that have been published recently here and in England. And we have done more. We have gone to the original source of all valid authority in our language - the best writers and speakers of it...

Semantics (the study of the relation between linguistic and real entities), pragmatics (the study of the purpose and conditions of sentences), and syntax (the study of the properties of verbal signs and their relations) have been a dominant triad in language studies since 1938 when the American philosopher Charles Morris introduced this division, derived from Peirce. It has recently been challenged by Chomsky, who subsumes into syntax the core of his cognitive approach, i.e. the analytical aspects of meaning, leaving all other aspects to pragmatics, dismissed as an irredeemably non-scientific practice. Cognitive semantics has recently brought out the semantic import of grammatical categories and claimed scientific respectability for the study of semantic functions involved in conceptualization. This has made the boundaries between these three traditional areas even more permeable. Finally, the encounter with cognitive science has tempered the anti-psychologist tendency that had long been a distinctive trait of analytic philoso¬phy. It would seem that language needs to be explained more and more in the context of a general theory of the mind, and is less and less a universal pass-partout that will open the doors of every philosophical closet. This change has expanded the epistemic potential of philosophy to an extent it is still difficult to assess. For language theories, too, the `rediscovery of the mind' seems destined to become a new frontier.