Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness

Simchen's Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness offers a fresh take on some of the most pressing issues in the philosophy of language. It takes a distinctly metasemantic position—understood as a metaphysical pursuit—as to what determines semantic significance or meaning. Although the book is relatively short and written in a generally accessible manner, it is not an introductory text by any means. It presupposes a thorough knowledge of not only first order semantics and some mathematical logic but also the original indeterminacy arguments posed by Quine and Putnam, respectively. Below, I provide a chapter summary and then briefly discuss a potential worry with the level at which the book is pitched. In the first chapter, Simchen sets the stage by defining the nature of metasemantics as an investigation of how semantically significant linguistic items become that way. The central question is ‘what determines that expressions have their semantic significance?’ (p.2). Importantly, Simchen focuses on two strands of the metasemantic debate in his preferred productivist approaches—those that take significance to be emergent from the production and employment of the significant items—and interpretationist ones—those which define significance in terms of the interpretive consumption or rather an item gets its significance from being interpreted or interpretable as such. The main aim of the chapter is to confront and debunk an alternative typology of metasemantics in which Lewisian reference magnetism acts as the top node of a hierarchy of theories and various other theories are conceived of as just ‘more theory’ below it. Simchen closes off the chapter by mounting an argument against reference magnetism in terms of its explanatory circularity in relying on sentential truth in both the ‘explanans’ and ‘explanandum’ of semantic endowment.

Cognitive science · Denotation (semiotics) · Epistemology · Indeterminacy (philosophy) · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Metaphysics · Philosophy of language · Quine · Semantics (computer science) · Vagueness · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology