I would like to thank Brendan Hogan and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for organising a session around my book at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) in San Francisco in 2007. The articles in this symposium are revisions of the contributions to that session. My book fits the agenda of the society in that it ‘advances’ a position which is at least partly indebted to American pragmatism. It is also, to a lesser extent, indebted to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, but the influence of neo-pragmatism looms large. This does not mean, however, that my position is compatible with classical pragmatism, and indeed some of the contributors to this symposium claim, rightly I think, that my position is in some respects at odds with that of Dewey’s.