Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness

Semantics aims to describe the significance (or meaning) of linguistic expressions in a systematic way. Metasemantics, or foundational semantics, asks how expressions gain their significance in the first place - what makes it the case that expressions mean what they do. Metasemantics has recently been discussed extensively by philosophers of language, philosophers of mind, and philosophically minded linguists and psychologists. A large concern is semantic indeterminacy, the worry that there is no fact of the matter as to the semantic significance of our words. Ori Simchen offers a distinctly metasemantic strategy to counter this threat. Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness is the first book-length treatment of metasemantics and its relation to the thriving research program of truth-conditional semantics.

Ori Simchen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He earned his MA in philosophy of science from Tel Aviv University and his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University. He is the author of Necessary Intentionality: A Study in the Metaphysics of Aboutness (Oxford University Press, 2012) and of various articles in journals such as Noûs, The Journal of Philosophy, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Legal Theory, and the Philosophical Quarterly.

- Introduction - 1: Metasemantics and Semantic Ascent - Appendix I: Lewisian Metasemantics - 2: The Case of Singular Reference - Appendix II: Scrambled Truth - Appendix III: Reference to Numbers - 3: Aboutness and Semantic Value - 4: Case Study I: Productivism and Self-Reference - 5: Case Study II: Metasemantics and Interpretation - 6: Conclusion: Semantic Determinacy