- Lived:
- 1925–2011 · London and Oxford, England
- Tradition:
- British analytic philosophy — philosophy of language, logic, and the theory of meaning
- The Big Idea:
- The meaning of a statement is fixed by what speakers can show in their use of it — so truth cannot float free of our capacity to recognize it, and even the laws of logic must answer to a theory of what understanding is.
- If you remember one thing:
- He delayed the twentieth century's greatest work of philosophical scholarship for years to fight racism in Britain — and then argued, in cold logical earnest, that the law of excluded middle is optional.