Stephen Schiffer

Pleonastic propositions play two important roles: first, we use them both to exploit the beliefs of others as a source of information about the world and to exploit the world as a source of information about the beliefs and desires of others; second, we use them to explain the behaviour of ourselves and others. Both roles are clarified and accounts are offered of how pleonastic propositions are able to play those roles. It is argued that no other things—neither non-pleonastic propositions nor linguistic entities of some kind—could play those roles as well as pleonastic propositions.

A theory of vagueness must lie at the heart of any complete theory of meaning. This chapter offers a theory of vagueness, and of indeterminacy generally, since the indeterminacy of vague borderline proposition is only one source of indeterminacy. The theory distinguishes two kinds of partial belief: standard partial belief, which is normatively governed by the axioms of probability theory, and what I call vagueness-related partial belief, which is not normatively governed by those axioms. Thanks to the pleonastic nature of properties, it is possible to define vagueness and indeterminacy in terms of vagueness-related partial belief. The account of vagueness is applied to the sorites paradox, and resolving that paradox requires distinguishing between what I call happy-face and unhappy-face solutions to a paradox. The theory of indeterminacy yields a resolution of Gareth Evans’s puzzle about indeterminate identity.

The face-value theory is that theory of the logical form of belief reports that must be defeated if it is not to be accepted. It holds that ‘A believes that S’ is true just in case A stands in the belief relation to the proposition that S. The theory constrains, but provides no complete account of, the nature of the propositions we believe. Most face-value theorists hold that the propositions we believe are structured, and the big contest here is between Russellian and Fregean propositions. Both conceptions are problematic.

Knowing what an expression means is neither knowing that it means such and such nor knowing how to do things with the expression; it is being in, or being apt to be in, a certain kind of language-processing state. The account of knowledge of meaning is seen to suggest that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as expression meanings. Whether or not that is so, there are things to which an expression must be related if it is to have meaning, and with an eye to David Kaplan’s characters, these things are called characters*. This leads to a critical discussion of two-dimensional semantics.

To have meaning is to stand in the meaning relation to a meaning, meanings taken to be characters*. This chapter is about the nature of the meaning relation. A theory of this relation requires saying what relation a person must bear to a language in order for that language to be her public language, and also what relation a person must bear to a language in order for that language to be her language of thought. The answers bear on questions about compositional semantics and about the supervenience of the intentional on the non-intentional.

The account of indeterminacy is brought to bear on conditionals, both indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. The existence of conditional propositions is easily secured on the theory of pleonastic propositions, and conditions are specified under which a conditional proposition is determinately true, determinately false, or indeterminate. These truth conditions generate a puzzle, in that the way we form partial beliefs in indeterminate conditional propositions is not what their truth conditions predict. The resolution makes an important concession to non-cognitivist accounts of indicative-conditional sentences.

This chapter focuses on a question: how does the intentionality of language 'derive' from the original intentionality of thought. Hardly any philosopher of language would deny that if something is an expression which has meaning in a population, then that is by virtue of facts about the linguistic behavior and psychological states of members of that population. The chapter starts with a reconstruction of Lewis's account of the relation in Convention because a problem that immediately arises for that account provides a natural segue to the more ambitious Intention‐Based Semantics (IBS) project. IBS is a program for reducing all questions about the intentionality of speech acts and linguistic expressions to questions about the intentionality of thought. It takes as foundational in the theory of meaning a certain notion of speaker‐meaning and seeks to define it, without recourse to any semantic notions, in terms of acting with certain audience‐directed intentions.

Every deflationist semantic theory has its inflationist correlate: this is the semantic theory the deflationist theory is designed to deflate. This chapter presents Radical Inflationism and Radical Deflationism as stipulatively defined theories, without regard to who might subscribe to them, or to one or another of their parts. Radical Deflationism is based on a view worked out over a number of important publications by Hartry Field. In other words, radical inflationist is on board with the view Hartry Field had when he wrote 'Tarski's theory of truth', that our notions of reference and truth are correspondence notions that stand in need of physicalistic explications. This is that Radical Deflationism's claim that the only reason we need a notion of truth is as a device of disquotation is hostage to the theory's ability to meet what we will presently see is its greatest challenge.