Does anyone here have an accessible copy of Alston's Philosophy of Language?

I'd like to verify a quotation. My fragmentary note says "Alston, p. 96," and I think Philosophy of Language is the only Alston title I've ever owned, but I can't locate it. I'm pretty sure the cover looks like this:



The quote is (paraphrased): It is possible to use a word intelligibly without using it in any of its senses.

I tried the book page first, but it's very hard to tell who on any given list of LTers is currently active. (I would love a feature that shows date of last visit on our profile pages, but I don't believe it's being considered.)

I also tried a Google search on keywords in the quote as I reconstructed it, looking for context, but I found nothing.

Thanks for any help.

Google Books shows this on p. 96:

"It is an extremely important fact about language that it is possible to use a word intelligibly without using it in any of its senses."

Thank you. For some reason I was unable to find that.

My note is a small, torn, crumbling scrap of paper that I wrote on sometime in the early 1970s. I just found it while selecting books to remove from my overcrowded shelves, and I remembered being struck by that idea. If I ever find my copy of the book (assuming it hasn't already been culled), maybe I'll read it again.

Intriguing quote! I can think of examples affirming it's a valid statement, but without context I'm not sure I get Alston's point. Do you recall the situation(s) being described?

>4 elenchus: Oh, dear, I wish I did. That's why I went looking for it. But my reading of that book took place in approximately 1972, assigned in a course at B.U. called Philosophy of Language, and I can't remember.

The visible snippet on the Google Books page isn't enough to furnish a useful context. I can think of examples, too, especially in idioms--such as "up" in these phrases: "lock him up," "give it up," "let's make up," "cut it up." Whether that's what he meant I no longer have any idea.

In my excavation of books, I've reached a vein of philosophy titles from the same period and content area, so maybe the Alston will come to light. That's optimistic, though. The odds are that this note was originally in the book and that my finding it inside something else--a Victorian novel, I think--means that the book is gone already.

Ah, that's a different case than I was thinking about, and I think a more interesting one. I was thinking of such usages as in a quotation, e.g. for voracious, "John said my dog was voracious".

I've just put the book on request at the library, so we'll see. As I recall, that wasn't the part of the course that interested me most at the time, but I found that idea intriguing enough to make a note of it.

It's possible that he was talking about metaphorical extension.