This thesis explores the question of technicity in relation to deconstruction. This question of `technics' is first explored in relation to Marx's analysis of the commodity. I examine Jean-Joseph Goux's attempt in Economie et Symbolique to extend the four-stage development of the commodity fetish to all forms of symbolic value including that of the linguistic sign. Here what I demonstrate is that Derrida's understanding of arche-writing, far from representing a `material restitution' of the sign as Goux hopes, in fact represents a process of exteriorisation that is irreducibly as ideal as it is material. This `originary technicity' of the sign then helps to explicate the `technical life' of the commodity as outlined by Derrida in Specters of Marx. Secondly, I examine Bernard Stiegler's influential recent work Technics and Time which attempts to generalise a technicity understood as the `prosthesis of the human' to a general theory of `inorganic organised matter', or an evolutionary technics which Stiegler calls epiphylogenesis. Here I analyse in some detail the logic of Stiegler's argument before moving on to query some of the basic assumptions in his reading of Derrida and Heidegger. Finally, I investigate the question of technicity in relation to the politics of deconstruction. Here I explore critically Richard Beardsworth's recent claims that there are two political legacies of Derrida's work, the one building on Derrida's thoughts around original technicity (Stiegler's route), the other concerned with a more religious or literary thinking of the `promise

This thesis is concerned with the meaning of metaphors. In particular, it examines a contemporary dispute in the philosophy of language, primarily comprising critical responses to Donald Davidson’s seminal work in the area, which focuses on the question of whether metaphorical utterances, qua metaphors, ought to receive distinctive semantic evaluations. I treat this debate as an instance of a more general form of philosophical dispute, which has been explored in some detail in recent work on the nature of realism and anti-realism. The thesis has five chapters. In the first chapter, I outline, motivate and evaluate two contrasting approaches to realism, proposed by Michael Devitt and Crispin Wright. I argue that neither is wholly satisfactory, but that a modified version of Wright’s approach is likely to be most fruitful in the philosophy of metaphor. In the second chapter, I examine the character of Davidson’s anti-realism, concluding that he is best thought of as an error-theorist about metaphorical meaning. I go on to set out a unified Davidsonian argument for semantic and pragmatic anti-realism about metaphor, and offer a sustained discussion and partial defence of the six premises that such an argument proceeds from. My third chapter outlines a series of common objectives to Davidson’s views, and argues that error-theorists have the resources to address many of these criticisms in a fairly plausible manner. In the fourth chapter, I go on to investigate the realist standing of metaphorical meaning in more detail. I examine the open-endedness of metaphor in the light of Wright’s response-dependent theory of intention, and argue that this approach offers a novel response to certain anti-realist concerns. The fifth chapter concerns the relationship between metaphor and non-conceptual content. I argue that thinking of metaphorical meanings as non-conceptual entails that the non-propositional and limitless character of metaphor does not pose a fatal objection to a pragmatic realist account, contra Davidson. I apply my suggested account to two test cases: metaphors that describe one’s emotional state, and religious metaphors, and argue that in each case, thinking of the metaphors as expressing non-conceptual contents is potentially suggestive and helpful. In that chapter, I also examine the possibility of an robustly realist approach to metaphorical meanings, modelled on the epistemicist approach to vagueness set out in recent work by Timothy Williamson. I demonstrate how the dominant objection to this account can be partially defused, and go on to examine the final standing of the dispute between realist and anti-realist.

In this dissertation I defend a non-indexicalist contextualist account of metaphorical interpretation. This theory, which works within Kaplan’s double-index semantic framework, claims that context does not have the only role of determining the content expressed by an utterance, but also the function of fixing the appropriate circumstance of evaluation relative to which that content is evaluated. My claim is that the metaphorical dimension of an utterance can be found in the circumstance of evaluation, and not in the content which is expressed by the utterance. To that effect, I introduce a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation of an utterance, which I call ‘thematic dimension’. I show how the introduction of this parameter is in harmony with a class of theories that have proposed a relativistic semantic treatment of other phenomena such as predicates of taste and knowledge ascriptions. At the same time, I question a number of other proposals, both semantic and pragmatic, which, I believe, do not reach the same level of empirical adequacy and formal correctness as my proposal.