William P. Alston, an American philosopher, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1951), and has taught at the University of Michigan (1949–1971), Rutgers University (1971–1976), the University of Illinois (1976–1980), and Syracuse University (1980–2000). Alston is a past president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Society of Christian Philosophers as well as the founding editor of both The Journal of Philosophical Research and Faith and Philosophy. He is best known for his work in epistemology, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.

Alston made his early reputation in Philosophy of Language (1964), where he rejects the verifiability criterion of meaning and referential theories, and argues that the meaning of a sentence consists in its illocutionary act potential. He defends this view in his recent Illocutionary...