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Many ‘pre-pragmatist’ opponents of the classical picture begin with a suspicion that such doctrines place unrealistic demands upon human capacity: that when we grasp a collection of vocabulary, its syntax rarely becomes as firmly attached to the world as the classical story promises. In overreaction, thinkers such as W. V. Quine frequently become sceptical that the world independently possesses attributes to which language might potentially attach at all. Such doubts are impossibly radical, but a pre-pragmatist can plausibly argue on engineering grounds that it is not easy to set classical-style semantic attachments in place. Confronted with these practical impediments, over time language often develops into more complicated forms of semantic arrangement than classical thinking anticipates.

There is more to measurement than its physical correlate. A broad concept of measurement must accommodate both the constraints on its physical correlate and its function of information gathering, which requires that the measurement outcome is an event that has meaning. Measurement is itself a specific form of self-location, in a logical space. Topics discussed include measurement and number-assigning, scale as logical space, data models, and surface models. As long as we consider what happens in measurement purely from the theoretical point of view, the only criteria are theory-internal. The criteria of adequacy cannot go beyond coherence. That is why the theoretical point of view remains empty unless the problem of coordination is also faced and taken into account. To understand how theoretical parameters become coordinated, the historical process in which measurement procedures and theory evolve together have to be looked into, in a thoroughly entangled way. Nor can this evolution start in anything but prior meaningful discourse relating to what eventually will be delineated as the theory's domain.

This chapter shows that the principle of the necessity of identity, which precludes proper treatment of names in standard possible worlds semantics, fails for logical and epistemic necessity. Model structures allow contingent identities as long as the co-representation relation is non-transitive. It is shown that there is no sound argument from the rigidity of names to the necessity of identity, and that other well known arguments for this principle are either invalid or question begging. The rigidity of names extends to worlds that are mere logical or epistemological possibilities, and is intensional.

Standard presentations of decision theory adopt some version of the invariance principle (that it is irrational to assign different utilities to propositions known to be equivalent). This normative principle raises problems for the idea that decision theory can serve as a theory of motivation. Frederic Schick has responded to this tension by proposing an intensional version of decision theory that allows a single outcome to be understood in different ways (and utilities to be assigned accordingly). This raises problems (such as the failure of the expected utility theorem) that can be dealt with by a more fine-grained way of individuating outcomes (as in Broome's theory of individuation by justifiers). Again, though, none of these strategies serves all three of the explanatory projects under consideration.

This chapter turns to specific objections against logical pluralism. There are a number of objections to classical, intuitionistic, and relevant logic which are specific to those logics, and not to the scheme of pluralism as a whole. Since it makes sense not only to be a pluralist about logical consequence, but to be a pluralist who endorses each of classical, constructive, and relevant reasoning, it becomes obligatory to say something about such logic-specific objections. These objections relate to coherence and relevant models, relevance and explosion, intensionality and the slingshot, and constructivity and semantics.

This essay applies the methodology of Essay 6 to singular causal statements. Rejecting rival accounts that use sentences to identify causes and effects, and an intensional connective like ‘caused it to be the case that’, Davidson prefers to construe causes and effects as referred to by singular terms; consequently, the relation of causality is extensional i.e. holds (if at all) regardless of how the terms are described. He investigates a thesis commonly attributed to Hume, whereby causal relations hold in virtue of laws or generalities that subsume their relata. After making precise the logical form of sentences stating those laws, Davidson agrees that a singular causal statement entails the existence of a nomological statement, but denies that it entails any particular such statement unless it already describes the causal relata in terms of types subsumed under that law (hence, we can know a singular causal statement to be true in the absence of knowing the correlative law).

This chapter develops a separate promising account of experiential intentionality, as free of any tracking-based relations. This is the adverbial theory of experiential intentionality. After laying out some relevant background (Section 3.1), two arguments against tracking-based accounts of experiential intentionality—including higher-order tracking theories—are considered (Sections 3.2–3.3). The main considerations behind them is then used as a launching pad for an alternative adverbial account (Section 3.4). Finally, certain objections are discussed, including one genuinely damaging objection (Section 3.5). The conclusion compares the relative merits and demerits of this account and the higher-order tracking theory.

Intentionality is a property of mental states: their being directed on things, or about things. Intensionality is a semantic property, marked by such features as failure of truth preservation when one referring expression is replaced by another with the same reference. Attributions of intentional states are intensional. This first chapter sets out the basic distinctions, describes some puzzles about intensionality (for example, how it is possible to think about unicorns when there are none to think about), and sketches the path to be taken in the rest of the book.

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibit a kind of basic intentionality. It does so by situating REC’s notion of Ur-intentionality within the larger history of attempts to explicate the notion of intentionality simpliciter, showing that there is conceptual space for and reason to believe in a nonrepresentational form of intentionality. The second part of the chapter provides a fresh analysis of how and why this most basic kind of intentionality can be best accounted for in naturalistic terms by means of a RECtified teleosemantics—one stripped of problematic semantic ambitions and put to different theoretical use, namely, that of explicating the most basic, nonsemantic forms of world-involving cognition.

This chapter focuses on transitive intensional verbs such as need, look for, buy, and recognize, and in particular the semantics of special quantifiers in constructions in which two transitive intensional verbs are said to share an object. It is argued that the shared object in such constructions is neither an abstract meaning (an intensional quantifier or a property) nor an entity of the sort of a need. Rather it is what I call a variable satisfier, an entity associated with a function mapping situations satisfying an entity like a need onto objects.

Aside from its benefits to semantics, the inclusion of the generalized form of Skolem terms avoids many paradoxes that arise when natural language quantifiers are represented by traditional existential quantifiers, including the seemingly anomalous scope of indefinites in donkey sentences. Some other operators besides quantifiers induce dependency in elements that are within their scope, such as negation, intensional verbs such as want and seek, modal verbs like might and will, and the conditional, if...then... This chapter focuses on semantics without existential quantifiers, along with intensionality, definites and indefinites, pronouns, the distributivity of quantifiers, the maximal participancy of plurals, negation, polarity, and monotone entailment.

Some philosophers, among whom are A. J. Ayer and Elisabeth Anscombe, have suggested that there are two uses, or senses, of ‘see’, on one of which one can only see what is there, on the other of which one might also see what is not there. This chapter argues that such is a misunderstanding of the phenomenon of intensionality, and correspondingly of the notion of intentionality (though in this last case, it is argued, it is as yet far from clear what intentionality is meant to be).

Wh‐elements in Chinese (as in Japanese and Korean) can have non‐interrogative interpretations, i.e. they are the so‐called ‘wh‐indeterminates’ la Kuroda 1965. While the existential (non‐interrogative) and universal readings of wh‐indeterminates have received a lot of attention the free choice interpretation of wh‐elements, however, has been discussed only recently (Giannakidou and Cheng 2006). On the surface, there are three types of Free Choice Items (FCIs) in Mandarin Chinese, all of which involve a wh‐related element. Though all three types appear to express free choice, they are not equal in terms of distribution and interpretation. The contrasts that we observe do not follow from recent accounts of wh‐indeterminates as Hamblin indefinites that are routinely closed by sentential quantifiers at the top level (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Kratzer 2006), since in these accounts the wh‐phrase merely forms the basis for creation of a Hamblin set of propositions, and polarity behaviour is not predicted. In this chapter, we discuss the non‐uniform distribution of Chinese wh‐indeterminates in their use as FCIs, and propose that the key to understanding the contrasts is intensionality: the three paradigms of wh‐indeterminates as FCIs vary depending on whether or not they contain a world variable that needs to be bound. In addition, we show that Chinese FCIs provide further evidence for Giannakidou and Cheng (2006), who propose that there are both definite and indefinite FCIs. Definite FCIs in Chinese will be shown to have the same composition as the Greek definite FCIs: maximality, core wh, and the intensional world variable.

What are the effects of grammar on the organization of meaning? A logically possible answer is: none. But this answer seems far too radical: on a number of grounds, it seems implausible that grammar would have no such effect on the organization of our rational minds. So what is the effect, exactly? Chapter 2 begins from a form of semantics already present in pre-linguistic perception. But as percepts become lexicalized as words, and as words start to develop grammatical functions, the organization of meaning changes again. We specifically develop an account of the kind of semantics associated with lexical atoms and with part of speech distinctions: the distinction, say, between how the word run functions when read as a noun or as a verb. Once we have arrived there, we argue, we have already arrived at grammar, and the semantics in question reflects how words implement grammatical functions: grammatical semantics