Stephen Roy Albert Neale (born 9 January 1958) is a British 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.

He completed his PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University with philosopher John Perry as his dissertation advisor.

Philosophical problems about interpretation, context, information content, structure, and representation form the nexus of this work.

Neale is an intentionalist and a pragmatist about the interpretation of speech and writing, and to this extent his work is rooted in the Gricean tradition.

According to Neale traditional accounts of interpretation are marred by failures that can be eradicated by (1) engaging correctly with the epistemic asymmetry of the situations in which producers and consumers of language find themselves; (2) distinguishing adequately the metaphysical question of what determines what a speaker (or writer or signer) means on a given occasion from the epistemological question of how that particular meaning is identified; (3) appreciating the severity of constraints on the formation of linguistic intentions; (4) appreciating pervasive forms of underdeterminaton (such as those examined by pragmatists and relevance theorists); (5) failures to recognise that genuine indeterminacy of the sort associated with what speakers (and writers) "imply" frequently applies to what is "said" too; (6) abandoning reliance on formal notions of context deriving from indexical logics, (7) scrutinising transcendent notions of "what is said", "what is implied" and "what is referred to"; and (8) correcting the role traditional compositional semantics plays in explanations of how humans use language to represent the world and communicate.