Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness
Ori Simchen
Abstract
A large concern in contemporary philosophy of language after Quine is semantic indeterminacy, the worry that there is no fact of the matter as to the semantic significance of our words. This book articulates a distinctly metasemantic strategy to counter the worry. Metasemantics is the metaphysics of semantic endowment: it asks how expressions become endowed with their semantic significance. Assuming that semantics is of the usual truth-conditional sort, metasemantics asks after the determinants of expressions’ distinctive contributions to truth-conditions. There are two widely divergent genera ... More
A large concern in contemporary philosophy of language after Quine is semantic indeterminacy, the worry that there is no fact of the matter as to the semantic significance of our words. This book articulates a distinctly metasemantic strategy to counter the worry. Metasemantics is the metaphysics of semantic endowment: it asks how expressions become endowed with their semantic significance. Assuming that semantics is of the usual truth-conditional sort, metasemantics asks after the determinants of expressions’ distinctive contributions to truth-conditions. There are two widely divergent general approaches to the metasemantic project. Some theories—“productivist” ones such as causal theories or intention-based theories—emphasize conditions of production or employment of the items semantically endowed. Other metasemantic theories—“interpretationist” ones—emphasize conditions of interpretive consumption or reception of such items. The book aims to articulate a set of considerations that favours metasemantic productivism over metasemantic interpretationism; to reconcile a general productivist metasemantic approach with contemporary truth-conditional semantics; and to apply the approach to more specialized case studies in the philosophy of language broadly construed.
Keywords:
semantics, metasemantics, productivism, interpretationism, semantic indeterminacy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198792147 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198792147.001.0001 |
