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This chapter clarifies the nature of propositions considered as semantic values, the nature of a compositional assignment of semantic values to sentences, and the nature of the circumstances at which propositions are evaluated for truth and falsity. Challenge to the motivation for positing propositions mentioned in the Introduction is addressed. It is argued that modal operators are distinctively different from tenses and place expressions, in that the former operate on propositions and the latter do not.

One can adopt a Fregean framework for semantics, according to which sentences are compositionally associated with conditional assignments of truth values, without adopting Functionist hypotheses about the semantic values of predicates. With regards to a large range of constructions, usually dealt with in the first chapters of standard textbooks, Functionism is no simpler than Conjunctivism. On a Functionist view, each predicate has exactly one semantic value — a set of a certain sort — while Conjunctivism fits better with the idea that a predicate can have many values. But various considerations, including vagueness, suggest that this difference is not merely notational; it may favor Conjunctivism. There are also independent motivations for appealing to the covert variables and thematic relations that Conjunctivists require. Functionists must appeal to these auxiliary hypotheses and more, given the need to accommodate both arguments and adjuncts.

This chapter takes issue with the common assumption that referential expressions and definite descriptions involving ‘mass nouns’ are semantically singular, thereby designating so-called parcels of matter or individual instances of stuff. The trouble is that whereas count nouns are either singular or plural, the so-called mass nouns, because they are non-count, are semantically neither singular nor plural. Russell’s Theory of Descriptions as well as considerations on persistence, identity, and flux are invoked to reinforce this point.

This chapter argues that the semantics for a given language should be taken to be given by a body of semantic requirements — in contrast to the two standard conceptions of a semantics, under which it is taken either to be an assignment of semantic values to the expressions of the language or to be a theory of truth for the sentences of the language.

This chapter discusses the Lukasiewicz continuum-valued semantics as a way of improving upon the Kleene semantics as the basis for an account of truth. It is shown that it gives a very nice treatment of the paradoxes within a quantifier-free fragment of the language, but that it breaks down when quantifiers are added. This account will nonetheless serve as something of a model for the view to be advocated later, and so a number of issues that will arise later are discussed here. These include the Curry paradox, the meaning of semantic values, and the notion of determinate truth.

Gottlob Frege argued that a single, undifferentiated notion of semantic value would not do. Instead, he insisted that semantic value must be divided into two components and he distinguished them as “referents” and “senses”. This chapter reviews Frege's argument as he presents it in (1892b) and elsewhere and start on exploring some of its underlying complications. Two principles are illustrated to generate the conclusion that an expression's overall semantic content must be divided into distinct components: the principle of compositionality and the principle that contents determine information value.

Mark Richard (1981) calls the thesis that propositions never change their truth-values over time ‘eternalism’ and the opposing view ‘temporalism’. Temporalism is committed to the view that temporal contents, contents that may have different truth-values at different times, have full proposition status. They may be (i) the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences, (ii) the objects of the attitudes (e.g. belief, doubt, hope, wish, and so on), (iii) the objects of agreement and disagreement, (iv) what is transferred or shared when people communicate successfully, and (v) the contents operated on by intensional operators (e.g., modal operators or tense operators). After offering more precise formulations of temporalism and eternalism, I argue that temporal contents are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences.

On the view developed in this chapter, the questions at the core of metasemantic inquiry have less to do with issues about content than is often assumed. Rather, these questions are better framed in terms of the notion of semantic value, ‘semantic value’ being a term of art of semantic theory. They are not questions of supervenience or cause, but of the ground of certain properties, properties articulated—in the current state of understanding, anyway—largely using the notion of semantic value. Specifically, they concern the ground of an aspect of a certain mental state postulated in linguistic theorizing, one that could informally be described as the state of knowing a language. They are questions whose answers are heavily constrained by the assumption of compositionality. Finally, they are questions barely on the horizon of systematic inquiry, and ones probably best pursued at present simply by pursuing semantic theory.

The chapter focuses on the question of whether internalism or externalism is true for talk about properties and propositions. Some of the standard arguments are discussed, in particular the substitution arguments. The role of semantic values in settling this question is brought out, and I argue against a close relationship between semantic values and reference. Instead, a proposal is made about the function of semantic values in a compositional semantics. Two large-scale pictures of the function of reference in natural language are formulated and discussed: the referential and the non-referential pictures of language. Overall, the chapter argues that that-clauses and property nominalizations are not referential, and that internalism should be accepted for talk about properties and propositions. A concluding section discusses how quantification over properties and propositions is to be formulated along internalist lines.

Some contextually sensitive expressions, here called supplementives, are such that their context‐independent conventional meanings need to be supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. The present work focuses on two questions: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? A metasemantics for supplementives is sketched and applied to a variety of supplementives. The prospects for extending the account to all supplementives is considered.

According to a widespread picture due to Kaplan, there are two levels of semantic value: character and content. Character is determined by the grammar, and it determines content with respect to context. In this chapter Recanati criticizes that picture on several grounds. He shows that we need more than two levels, and rejects the determination thesis: that linguistic meaning as determined by grammar determines content. Grammatical meaning does not determine assertoric content, he argues, but merely constrains it—speaker’s meaning necessarily comes into play. On the alternative picture he offers, there are four basic levels, only one of which is determined by the grammar. Pragmatics is what enables the transition from each level to the next.

The main aim of this introductory chapter is to develop a detailed conception of metasemantics. The conception developed rests on a tripartite distin metaphysics of semantic values. Each project is discussed in turn. The presented conception of the metasemantics terrain is then used to help situate the various essays in the present collection relative to one another, and to the larger philosophical landscape.

Some foundational assumptions of the generative paradigm in linguistic semantics are outlined. It is argued that they do not suffice, on their own, to license the drawing of metaphysically immodest conclusions about the assigned semantic values on the basis of narrowly semantic premises. It is concluded that if we seek to establish metaphysical conclusions from semantic starting points, we need additional premises not provided by narrowly linguistic semantics alone. The possibility is bruited that we may be furnished such premises from some style or other of broadly philosophical semantics and metasemantics, setting the stage for a subsequent discussion of various alternative metasemantical theses about the proper dialectical role of semantic analyses vis-à-vis metaphysical inquiry.

The first part of this chapter articulates an answer in terms of a re-interpretation of perception and testimony as data providers rather than full-blown cases of knowledge. But then, if perception and testimony are correctly understood as data providers, how is one supposed (to apply this analysis in order) to understand the semantic value of the data provided by such processes? The second part of the chapter argues in favour of a constructionist hypothesis about how data may become meaningful for human cognitive agents through a process of repurposing of natural data/signals. The conclusion of the chapter is that, from a non-naturalistic, constructionist perspective, human agents are natural-born data hackers.

On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that representss the situation of speech. In classical frameworks, this parameter plays two roles: it contributes to determining the content of utterances and it is used to define logical consequence. This paper argues that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language, which are supported by an increasing body of cross-linguistic data, are incompatible with this traditional view. The moral is that context has no place in semantic theory proper. We should revert back to so-called multiple-indexing frameworks that were developed by Montague and others, and relegate context to the postsemantic stage of a theory of meaning.

In the current chapter, I consider two competing metasemantic outlooks and their consequences for the metaphysical modesty or immodesty of first order semantic analysis. The two metasemantic approaches are rooted in what I call referential semantics and what I call ideational semantics. The foundational assumptions of referential metasemantics and ideational metasemantics are outlined with a focus on how each approach attempts to solve the determination problem. It is argued that different approaches to the determination problem lead to two different approaches to the metaphysics of the assigned semantic values. Finally, the way of ideas in metaphysics is distinguished from the way of reference in metaphysics.

The Conclusion sums up Against Facts’ main findings: in part I and II Armstrong’s truthmaker argument and the argument from nominal reference have been shown to be unsound. The two kinds of methodology used in the two parts of the book are highlighted, and certain enterprises in language-based descriptive metaphysics are criticised, namely enterprises that pretends to discover something about metaphysical entities by citing natural language analyses. It is argued that at least in case of technical philosophical terms like ‘fact’, ‘proposition’, ‘event’, and the like, reference collapses into fixing by stipulation a semantic value for those terms. The methodological proposal is made that we are entitled to take certain (categories of) entities as semantic value of certain expressions only if these entities are best-explanation players for the theoretical roles we deemed must indispensably be played, where indispensability is decided by criteria of theory choice agreed upon by the largest scientific community. It is concluded that defenders of facts have so far failed to show that facts should be given any place in metaphysics.

This chapter examines first and foremost the emergence of the information discourse in biology at the end of the 1940s, and then follows its instantiation in the later analyses of genetic codes, where it resulted in a deconstruction. While it now seemed technically legitimate to speak of molecules, genes, and organisms as information and linguistic systems, there was a fatal flaw in this discursive reconfiguration, for in information theory, language is purely syntactic and information has no semantic value. Ironically, these new scriptural representations of heredity endured as a metaphor for the eternal word, or book of life, but in their strict technical sense led to the erasure of its meaning. Eminent physicists, biophysicists, chemists, mathematicians, communication engineers, and computer analysts—whose own projects situated them at the hub of weapons design, operations research, and computerized cryptology—joined in the effort to “crack the code of life.”