Some of the theses I defend in this book have their origin in the D. Phil. dissertation I wrote at Oxford more than twenty years ago, under the supervision of Professor Sir Peter Strawson. With gratitude, I acknowledge his positive contribution to their development. A number of ideas and arguments contained here have been published locally in Turkey, in a variety of journals and books, and some overlap to a degree with the themes ofthe following papers of mine:
"The Speaker's Communicative Intent", Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, V 10, 1980, pp. 19-38.
"The Fringes of Natural Meaning", Philosophia, V 12, 1983, pp. 337-343.
"Natural Meaning", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, V 70, 1992, pp. 296-306 .
"On the Cause of Sensory Experience", Deucalion, V 12, 1994, pp. 253-275.
"Resemblance cannot be partial identity", Philosophical Quarterly, April 1998.
I am grateful to the editors ofthese journals for letting me make use of the material. Part of the final chapter will appear in the proceedings ofthe 3rd congress of the Gesellschaft fur die Analytische Philosophie (Munich, September 1997) under the title "Why does time flow?" I wish to thank the general editor of this series, Professor Robert Cohen, for his encouragement and suggestions which helped me to improve the text. My greatest debt is to my colleague Stephen Voss, who read the entire text, gave me extensive philosophical and stylistic criticism and helped me eliminate a number of errors. Thanks to his penetrating and constructive criticism I have been able to develop many arguments better. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the support ofthe Turkish Academy of Sciences.