Metasemantics

Alexis Burgess is an assistant professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He works mainly at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His articles have appeared in journals like Linguistics and Philosophy, Noûs, and The Australasian Journal of Philosophy. With John P. Burgess, he is co-author of Truth (Princeton University Press).; Brett Sherman is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester. His research centers on problems in the philosophy of language and epistemology.

• Preface ; Introduction: A Plea for the Metaphysics of Meaning ; 1. Semantics and Metasemantics in the Context of Generative Grammar ; 2. Metasemantics and Metaphysical Indeterminacy ; 3. The Metasemantics of Contextual-Sensitivity ; 4. Semantic Hermeneutics ; 5. Troubles for Content I ; 6. Troubles for Content II: Explaining Grounding ; 7. Deflationism in Semantics and Metaphysics ; 8. Discourse Content ; 9. Do We Need Dynamic Semantics? ; 10. Explanation and Partiality in Semantic Theory ; 11. Replacing Truth? ; 12. Prepragmatics: Widening the Semantics/Pragmatics Boundary ; 13. Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account

Metasemantics is a valuable addition to the literature in philosophy of language and linguistics ... It should be clear from these summaries that this is a wide ranging and extremely interesting collection that reflects many current trends in philosophical theorising about language, notably attention to developments in formal semantics ... It clearly shows the continued relevance of semantic and metasemantic issues to metaphysics, metaethics, and other areas of philosophy, as well as the intrinsic interest of various metasemantic questions. I look forward to seeing the new wave of metasemantic theorising that is likely to follow.