In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...) that meaningfulness is a matter of being governed by rules of use and that meanings are best thought of in terms of use-conditions. I will do this by sketching the Rule-Governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that the view isn’t by itself subject to the two problems, and explain why the idea has had a lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan and why we should find it continually attractive. (shrink)

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...) that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...) that it doesn’t result in a factual mistake, that is, in saying or thinking something false. On an alternative construal it is instead to say that it doesn’t result in a distinctively linguistic mistake, that is, in misusing the expression. It is natural to think that these two construals of semantic correctness are simply about different things and not in competition with each other. However, this is not the common view. Instead, several philosophers who subscribe to the orthodox construal have argued that the alternative construal of correctness as use in accordance with meaning doesn’t make any sense, partly because there are no clear cases of linguistic mistakes (Whiting 2016, Wikforss 2001). In this paper I develop and defend the idea that there’s a distinctively linguistic notion of correctness as use in accordance with meaning and argue that there are clear cases of linguistic mistakes. (shrink)

A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on (...) a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality. At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest. (shrink)

Magnetism in meta-semantics is the view that the meaning of our words is determined in part by their use and in part by the objective naturalness of candidate meanings. This hypothesis is commonly attributed to David Lewis, and has been put to philosophical work by Brian Weatherson, Ted Sider and others. I argue that there is no evidence that Lewis ever endorsed the view, and that his actual account of language reveals good reasons against it.

Paul Pietroski has developed a powerful minimalist and internalist alternative to standard compositional semantics, where meanings are identified with instructions to fetch or assemble human concepts in specific ways. In particular, there appears to be no need for Fregean Function Application, as natural language composition only involves processes of combining monadic or dyadic concepts, and Pietroski’s theory can then, allegedly, avoid both singular reference and truth conditions. He also has a negative agenda, purporting to show, roughly, that the vocabulary of (...) standard truth conditional semantics is far too powerful to plausibly describe the linguistic competence of mere human minds. In this paper, I explain some of the basics of Pietroski’s compositional semantics and argue that his major objection to standard compositionality is inconclusive, because a similar argument can be mounted against his own minimalist theory. I argue that we need a clear distinction between the language of the theorist---theoretical notation---and the language whose nature we are trying to explain. The theoretical notation should in fact be as expressively powerful as possible. It does not follow that the notation cannot be used to explain mere human linguistic competence, even if human minds are limited in various ways. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...) Davidson does not require uses of language to be self-perpetuating, in the way required by conventionalism, in order to be bona fide components of linguistic systems. Second, I argue that Davidson’s objections to conventionalism from language innovation and language variation fail, and that certain kinds of negative data in language use require an appeal to diachronic social relations. However, I also argue that recent work on communication in the a.. (shrink)

According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what (...) I call “sneaky reference.” I close by reflecting on the ramifications of these arguments for the theory of meaning more broadly. (shrink)

Conceptual engineers aim to revise rather than describe our concepts. But what are concepts? And how does one engineer them? Answering these questions is of central importance for implementing and theorizing about conceptual engineering. This paper discusses and criticizes two influential views of this issue: semanticism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change linguistic meanings, and psychologism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change psychological structures. I argue that neither of these accounts can give us the full story. (...) Instead, I propose and defend the Dual Content View of Conceptual Engineering. On this view, conceptual engineering targets concepts, where concepts are understood as having two kinds of contents: referential content and cognitive content. I show that this view is independently plausible and that it gives us a comprehensive account of conceptual engineering that helps to make progress on some of the most difficult problems surrounding conceptual engineering. (shrink)

It is common to think that what theory of linguistic vagueness is correct has implications for debates in philosophy of law. I disagree. I argue that the implications of particular theories of vagueness on substantive issues of legal theory and practice are less far-reaching than often thought. I focus on four putative implications discussed in the literature concerning (i) the value of vagueness in the law, (ii) the possibility and value of legal indeterminacy, (iii) the possibility of the rule of (...) law, and (iv) strong discretion. I conclude with some methodological remarks. Delineating questions about conventional meaning, the metaphysics/metasemantics of (legal) content determination, and norms of legal interpretation and judicial practice can motivate clearer answers and a more refined understanding of the space of overall theories of vagueness, interpretation, and law. (shrink)

An idiolectal conception of language is compatible with a substantive role for external things — objects, including other people — in the characterization of idiolects. Illustrations of this role are not hard to come by. The point of looking outward from the individual is pretty evident for the case of reference to perceptually encountered objects: had the world been significantly different, a person with the same molecular history would have acquired, and called by the same familiar names, different physical and (...) other concepts. An idiolectal conception of language is by no means committed, and has some reason to be opposed, to internalism, and to individualism in Burge's sense; that is, to the view that the organization of the body, abstracting from external things, is constitutive of any linguistically significant aspect of language. (shrink)

A growing number of philosophers and linguists have argued that many, if not most, terms in our language should be understood as semantically context sensitive. In opposition to this trend, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore defend a view they call "Semantic Minimalism", which holds that there are virtually no semantically context sensitive expressions in English once you get past the standard list of indexicals and demonstratives such as "I", "you", "this", and "that". While minimalism strikes many as obviously false, it (...) will be argued here that the view is more plausible than commonly assumed if one accepts the 'normative' conception of the relation between meaning and use characteristic of the literature on semantic externalism. That said, it is not clear that Cappelen and Lepore always conceive of their minimal semantic contents in this more normative fashion, and once this framework is place, a version of 'moderate contextualism' that they do not consider comes into view. (shrink)

‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution was devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II is about (...) recent answers to the skeptical paradox and Boghossian’s and Wright’s new puzzles. (shrink)

This chapter defends a view of semantics on which developing a semantic theory closely resembles developing a scale of measurement. The view helps explain how semantics has made so much progress despite deep disagreements about the target of semantic theorizing (e.g., between those who maintain that semantics is characterizing something psychological, and those who maintain that it is characterizing something social), how appeals to set-theoretic abstracta make sense despite Benacerraf-style worries and despite the fact that set-theoretic entities fit badly with (...) standard (e.g., causal) metasemantic views, and why the threat of radical context sensitivity does not undermine the semantic project. (shrink)

Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as ...

Theoretical equivalence and duality are two closely related notions: but their interconnection has so far not been well understood. In this paper I explicate the contribution of a recent schema for duality to discussions of theoretical equivalence. I argue that duality suggests a construal of theoretical equivalence in the physical sciences. The construal is in terms of the isomorphism of models, as defined by the schema. This construal gives interpretative constraints that should be useful for discussions of theoretical equivalence more (...) generally. I illustrate the construal in various formulations of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. (shrink)

We advocate an account of dualities between physical theories: the basic idea is that dual theories are isomorphic representations of a common core. We defend and illustrate this account, which we call a Schema, in relation to symmetries. Overall, the account meshes well with standard treatments of symmetries. But the distinction between the common core and the dual theories prompts a distinction between three kinds of symmetry: which we call ‘stipulated’, ‘accidental’ and ‘proper’.

We argue that presentism, understood as a view about time and existence, can perspicuously be defined in opposition to all other familiar contenders without appeal to any notion of presentness or cognate notions such as concreteness. Given recent worries about the suitability of such notions to cut much metaphysical ice, this should be welcomed by presentism's defenders. We also show that, irrespective of its sparse ideology, the proposed formulation forestalls any deviant interpretation at odds with the view it aims to (...) capture. (shrink)

Formal pragmatics plays an important, though secondary, role in modern analytical philosophy of language: its aim is to explain how context can affect the meaning of certain special kinds of utterances. During recent years, the adequacy of formal tools has come under attack, often leading to one or another form of relativism or antirealism.1 Our aim will be to extend the critique to formal pragmatics while showing that sceptical conclusions can be avoided by developing a different approach to the issues. (...) In particular, we will show that formal pragmatics cannot provide a complete account of how context affects the meaning of utterances, both on its own terms and when faced with evidence of important aspects of natural languages. The focal issue is the relevant kind of context in which pragmatics should examine utterances. Our contention will be that the relevant context of an utterance is determined by the function of that utterance, this function being dependent upon the primary function of language – to convey information. We will argue that the functions of utterances and of language are too broad to be caught by the tools of formal pragmatics of the sort advocated by Montague (1968, 1974), which are an extension the methods of traditional model-theoretic semantics.2 The particular formal approach we will use as the main example is David Kaplan’s position (1979, 1989),3 an extension of Montague’s program. (shrink)

Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal (...) leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology. (shrink)

The paper has two principal aims. First, Pietroski's sparse account of semantic composition will be favourably compared to the familiar full Frege hierarchy of composed semantic types. Second, I shall introduce the idea of a head as employed in linguistics and pose the problem of how to square Pietroski's compositional principles with the asymmetry entailed by headedness. The paper will leave the problem of headedness as an outstanding issue to be resolved.

The beliefs involved in the placebo effect are often assumed to be self-fulfilling, that is, the truth of these beliefs would merely require the patient to hold them. Such a view is commonly shared in epistemology. Many epistemologists focused, in fact, on the self-fulfilling nature of these beliefs, which have been investigated because they raise some important counterexamples to Nozick’s “tracking theory of knowledge.” We challenge the self-fulfilling nature of placebo-based beliefs in multi-agent contexts, analyzing their deep epistemological nature and (...) the role of higher-order beliefs involved in the placebo effect. (shrink)

Many think that expressivists have a special problem with negation. I disagree. For if there is a problem with negation, I argue, it is a problem shared by those who accept some plausible claims about the nature of intentionality. Whether there is any special problem for expressivists turns, I will argue, on whether facts about what truth-conditions beliefs have can explain facts about basic inferential relations among those beliefs. And I will suggest that the answer to this last question is, (...) on most plausible attempts at solving the problem of intentionality, ‘no’. (shrink)

Taking a lead from Eva Picardi’s work and influence, I investigate the significance of Frege’s context principle for the philosophy of language. I argue that there are some interpretive problems with recent meta-semantic interpretations of the principle. Instead, I offer a somewhat weaker alternative: the context principle is a tool to license certain definitions. Moreover, I claim that it merely lays out one of many possible ways of licensing a definition. This means, among other things, that despite Frege’s imperative injunctions, (...) the context principle formulates a permission—not a requirement. (shrink)

Two of the most fundamental questions about language are these: what are languages?; and, what is it to know a given language? Many philosophers who have reflected on these questions have presented answers that attribute a central role to conventions. In one of its boldest forms such a view runs as follows. Languages are either social entities constituted by networks of social conventions or abstract objects where when a particular community speaks a given language they do so in virtue of (...) the conventions operative within that community. Consequently, for an individual to know a given language is for them to be party to the relevant conventions. Call this view conventionalism. In this article my aim is to evaluate conventionalism. I will argue that although there are linguistic conventions and that they do play an important role in language development and communication conventionalism should be rejected in favour of a more psychologistically orientated position. (shrink)

The standard model of precedential constraint holds that a court is equally free to modify a precedent of its own and a precedent of a superior court—overruling aside, it does not differentiate horizontal and vertical precedents. This paper shows that no model can capture the U.S. doctrine of precedent without making that distinction. A precise model is then developed that does just that. This requires situating precedent cases in a formal representation of a hierarchical legal structure, and adjusting the constraint (...) that a precedent imposes based on the relationship of the precedent court and the instant court. The paper closes with suggestions for further improvements of the model. (shrink)

The phenomenon of performativity has recently sparked debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics ‘performs’ social reality, rather than merely reflects it, then every theory can be considered ‘true.’ My main goal is to point out three limits of performativity. First, not all theories can be performative since some do not produce empirical landmarks for agents. Second, social institutions restrict performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity that a theory (...) to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to a general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention à la David Lewis. (shrink)

In "Convention and Dickie's Institutional Theory" (British Journal of Aesthetics 1980), Catherine Lord maintains the following thesis: (L) If a work of art is defined as institutional and conventional, then the definition precludes the freedom and creativity associated with art. Lord also maintains that the antecedent of this conditional is false. In this note, I argue that (i) certain confusions and assumptions prevent Lord from showing the antecedent is false, and (ii) even if the antecedent is assumed to be true, (...) there are counterexamples to the entire conditional. With regard to (ii), I will suggest that conventionality is necessary for creativity. [This was my first published paper, written as a graduate student, taken from my University of Illinois at Chicago dissertation written with Professor George Dickie on the topic of conventions, utilitizing David Lewis' definition of "convention."]. (shrink)

Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This article explores a puzzle raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we (...) must individuate languages in a way that counts them as speaking our language L, assigns t a determinately derogatory content in L, and still accommodates the other features of slurs’ linguistic profile. Given the difficulty of doing this, there is some reason to give a non-semantic analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs. The author suggests that rather than dismissing the stubborn as semantically incompetent, we would do better to appeal to expected uptake as moral reasons for the stubborn to adjust their linguistic practices. (shrink)

It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.

This paper argues against definitions of depiction in terms of the syntactic and semantic properties of symbol systems. In particular, it is argued that John Kulvicki's definition of depictive symbol systems in terms of relative repleteness, semantic richness, syntactic sensitivity and transparency is susceptible to similar counterexamples as Nelson Goodman's in terms of syntactic density, semantic density and relative repleteness. The general moral drawn is that defining depiction requires attention not merely to descriptive questions about syntax and semantics, but also (...) to foundational questions about what makes it the case that depictions have the syntactic and semantic properties they do. (shrink)

By defining both depictive and linguistic representation as kinds of symbol system, Nelson Goodman attempts to undermine the platitude that, whereas linguistic representation is mediated by convention, depiction is mediated by resemblance. I argue that Goodman is right to draw a strong analogy between the two kinds of representation, but wrong to draw the counterintuitive conclusion that depiction is not mediated by resemblance.

I will argue that social ontology is constituted as hierarchical and interlocking conventions of multifarious kinds. Convention, in turn, is modeled in a manner derived from that of David K. Lewis. Convention is usually held to be inadequate for models of social ontologies, with one primary reason being that there seems to be no place for normativity. I argue that two related changes are required in the basic modeling framework in order to address this (and other) issue(s): (1) a shift (...) to an intentional model—among other reasons, in order to account for normativity—and (2) moving away from the belief-desire, propositional attitude, framework for understanding the intentional realm toward an interactive, pragmatic model of intentionality. These shifts provide natural approaches to: (1) understanding the normativities of social realities; (2) the sense in which social ontology is often constituted in implicit relations among the participants rather than elaborated and iterated explicit beliefs and desires; (3) and language. (shrink)

Philosophers are often beholden to a picture of language as a largely static, well-defined structure which is handed over from generation to generation by an arduous process of learning: language, on this view, is something that we are given, and that we can make use of, but which we play no significant role in creating ourselves. This picture is often maintained in conjunction with the idea that several distinctively human cognitive capacities could only develop via the language acquisition process, as (...) thus understood. This paper argues that the phenomenon of homesign, i.e., spontaneous gesture systems devised by deaf children for the purpose of communicating with their non-signing peers, can shed valuable empirical light on these convictions. Contrary to grounding assumptions of Wittgensteinian, Gricean, and Peircean approaches to language, homesign shows how core properties of language—including semantic properties—can be built from the ground up in idiosyncratic ways to serve the communicative needs of individuals. (shrink)

An important moral category—dishonest speech—has been overlooked in theoretical ethics despite its importance in legal, political, and everyday social exchanges. Discussion in this area has instead been fixated on a binary debate over the contrast between lying and ‘merely misleading’. Some see lying as a distinctive wrong; others see it as morally equivalent to deliberately omitting relevant truths, falsely insinuating, or any other species of attempted verbal deception. Parties to this debate have missed the relevance to their disagreement of the (...) notion of communicative dishonesty. Communicative dishonesty need not take the form of a lie, yet its wrongness does not reduce to the wrongness of seeking to deceive. This paper therefore proposes a major shift of attention away from the lying/misleading debate and towards the topic of communicative dishonesty. Dishonesty is not a simple notion to define, however. It presupposes a difficult distinction between what is and is not expressed in a given utterance. This differs from the more familiar distinction between what is and is not said, the distinction at the heart of the lying/misleading debate. This paper uses an idea central to speech act theory to characterize dishonesty in terms of the utterer’s communicative intentions, and applies the resulting definition to a variety of contexts. (shrink)

This article defends the view that having a language just is knowing how to engage in communication with it. It also argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this view is compatible and complementary with the Chomskyan conception of language on which humans have languages in virtue of being in brain states realizing tacit knowledge of grammars for those languages.

In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend upon reference: this involves (...) distinguishing semantic denotation from pragmatic speaker reference and claiming that there may or may not exist a metasemantic connection between these two notions. Finally, I argue that reference is not in general inscrutable—that this metasemantic connection does exist in the case of our ordinary discourse about present macroscopic concrete objects—but that it is in pure mathematics, where reference cannot be secured, and which therefore plays no role in accounting for truth. In this manner, alethic pluralism is upheld. (shrink)

According to decision theory, the rational initial action in a sequential decision-problem may be found by backward induction or folding back. But the reasoning which underwrites this claim appeals to the agent's beliefs about what she will later believe, about what she will later believe she will still later believe, and so forth. There are limits to the depth of people's beliefs. Do these limits pose a threat to the standard theory of rational sequential choice? It is argued, first, that (...) the traditional solutions of certain games depend on knowledge which exceeds depth limits, and that these solutions therefore cannot be shown rational in the usual sense. Then, for that related reason even folding back solutions of one-person problems cannot be! A revision of our notion of rational choice is proposed, analogous to the reliabilist account of knowledge of Goldman and others, by which this paradox is resolved. (shrink)

Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving them. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of assertoric imprecision motivates a rejection of the widely held belief (...) that a semantic theory for a language associates a single semantic value with each of the simple and complex expressions of that language, relative to the contexts in which they occur. Instead, I propose that we adopt a framework I call semantic pluralism. (shrink)