Interpretive Objects Goes to Press

Interpretive Objects Goes to Press

Over three years after delivering the Hempel Lectures at Princeton University, the book based on those lectures, Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law, has finally been sent to the press for production. it will appear from Princeton University Press in late summer or fall 2027, hopefully in time to celebrate my 50th birthday.

I don’t know what the book will actually look like - no one will know for likely the next 6-8 months - but now that I am done procrastinating my other projects by revising this book I’ve had the opportunity to procrastinate by mocking up jacket designs. This is what I currently imagine.

Draft of cover copy:

Interpretive objects are everywhere.  Clouds that look like dragons, rocks that look like eagles, emoticons that look like faces.  But they have been neglected by philosophers.  In this far-ranging book, Mark Schroeder argues that misunderstandings across many topics ranging from aesthetics to the philosophy of language and mind to personal identity and the philosophy of action to the philosophy of law arise because philosophers have mistaken interpretive objects for other kinds of thing. 

 Developing a new framework for thinking about interpretive objects and how to distinguish them from other kinds of thing, Schroeder argues that many of the things most important for human experience – not only works of literature, but also words, laws, and even people like us – are actually interpretive objects, unified not by source or function, but by interpretability.  It is no coincidence that this is so, he shows, because interpretive objects offer a respectable modern way of reviving the ancient worldview that the world itself is imbued with purpose.  That is why all and only interpretive objects are the place to look for inherent meaning – whether in language, life, or law.

 The great power of the analytic method in philosophy is that it allows us to make progress by breaking large and difficult problems down into smaller, easier problems.  Sometimes this leads us to lose track of why those small problems matter.  This book is about the all-important task of putting things back together.