Stephen Roy Albert Neale (born 9 January 1958) is a British
Analytic philosopher and specialist in the
philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center,
City University of New York (CUNY) and has previously held positions at
Princeton University,
University of California, Berkeley, and
Rutgers University. He is one of the world's leading authorities on
Bertrand Russell's
Theory of Descriptions, on the philosophies of
Paul Grice and
Donald Davidson, and on the intricacies of formal arguments in logic known as slingshots. His best known writings are the books
Descriptions (1990) and
Facing Facts (2001), and the articles "Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy" (1987), "Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language" (1992), "Term limits" (1993), "No Plagiarism Here!" (2001).