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The utterance of any expression x ostends or makes manifest the customary referent of x, x itself, and related matter. If x appears in quotation marks then the presumed intention behind the utterance is to pick out something other than the customary referent (either instead of it or in addition to it). The consequences of these ideas, taken from my 1998 work, are here drawn out in application to a variety of quotations: metalinguistic citation, reported speech, scare-quoting, echo-quoting, loan words, and titles.

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Pascal's Wager is finding ever more defenders who aim to undermine the old Many Gods Objection. It is my thesis that they are mistaken. After describing the Wager and the objection, I report on Jeff Jordan's repeated attempt to limit legitimate religious hypotheses to those that are traditional. In separate sections I criticize Jordan, first coming from epistemology and second from anthropology. Then I describe George Schlesinger's repeated appeal to the ‘simplest’ religious hypothesis, and argue that it fails for similar reasons. Finally, I summarize and reject miscellaneous defences of Pascal by Robert Anderson, Bradley Armour-Garb, James Franklin, Joshua Golding, and Nicholas Rescher.