The Australian National University is a major centre of research in the humanities, fine arts, and the natural, physical and social sciences. A comparatively small but research-intensive university, it provides wonderful opportunities to introduce undergraduate students to research activity early in their university studies. Cross-sections: the Bruce Hall Academic Journal has been established to promote academic excellence, to provide a means by which our students can experience the process of preparing manuscripts for publication and to strengthen links between undergraduate students and ANU academic staff.
Bruce Hall has a long-standing tradition of academic distinction of which we are very proud. This journal is our latest and most ambitious way of celebrating the best work of members of our community. The pieces included in the following pages are representative of the breadth of academic experience in the Hall as well as the great depth of interest of each author in their chosen area of study. We hope the collected works in this volume will serve as exemplars for other students in Hall, encouraging them to match the authors’ efforts as well as the quality of their resulting manuscripts and artworks.

In a close critical analysis of five of Ernest Hemingway’s novels and a number of his most important short stories, Professor Benson provides a fascinating new view of his work. The novels discussed are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees, and the Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s art of self-defense, which Professor Benson refers to in his subtitle, was, as he demonstrates in his perceptive criticism, the writer’s use of style and technique to attack the sentimentalities which were Hemingway’s own weakness.

According to the dominant theory of meaning, truth-conditional semantics, to explain the meaning of a statement is to specify the conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Classical truth-conditional semantics is coming under increasing attack, however, from contextualists and inferentialists, who agree that meaning is located in the mind.
How to Think about Meaning develops an even more radical mentalist semantics, which it does by shifting the object of semantic inquiry. Whereas for classical semantics the object of analysis is an abstract sentence or utterance such as "Grass is green," for attitudinal semantics the object of inquiry is a propositional attitude such as "Speaker so-and-so thinks grass is green." Explicit relativization to some speaker S allows for semantic theory then to make contact with psychology, sociology, historical linguistics, and other empirical disciplines.
The attitudinal approach is motivated both by theoretical considerations and by its practical success in dealing with recalcitrant phenomena in the theory of meaning. These include: presuppositions as found in hate speech, and more generally the connotative force of evaluative language; the problem of how to represent ambiguity; quotation and the use-mention distinction; and the liar paradox, which appears to contradict truth-based semantics.