Stephen Schiffer

Philosophers have long debated whether abstract objects such as numbers and properties exist, but in recent years philosophical debate about what things exist has been ratcheted up more than a notch to question whether even ordinary objects such as pineapples and tables exist. One view has it that all existence questions are difficult questions whose answers hang on achieving an ontological theory that succeeds in carving nature at its joints. Some proponents of this view further claim to have succeeded in that carving, even without the benefit of any instrument sharper than the a priori arguments conjured in their armchairs, and to have discovered, alas, that no ordinary concrete objects exist. Naturally, many of us have been made to wonder what premise in the argument for that conclusion enjoys a plausibility greater than that of the negation of the argument's conclusion. In her remarkable new book, Ontology Made Easy, Amie Thomasson strives to do much more than that in defense of common‐sense ontology. But not only for common‐sense ontology. She propounds a unified approach to all existence questions—whether about the existence of dogs, shoes or tables, or about the existence of numbers, propositions or fictional characters—according to which existence questions “are not deep and difficult subjects for metaphysical dispute, but rather questions to be resolved straightforwardly by employing our conceptual competence, often combining this with empirical investigations” (20). Thomasson calls her way of resolving existence questions the easy approach to ontology, and to that I now turn.

Brian Loar attempted to provide the Gricean program of intention-based semantics with an account of expression-meaning. But the theory he presented, like virtually every other foundational semantic or meta-semantical theory, was an idealization that ignored vagueness. What would happen if we tried to devise theories that accommodated the vagueness of vague expressions? I offer arguments based on well-known features of vagueness that, if sound, show that neither Brian’s nor any other extant theory could successfully make that adjustment, and this because, if sound, the arguments show not only that nothing can be the content of a vague expression, but also that no spoken language has a compositional semantics. This raises the question of what, really, are the facts about a language whose explanation might seem to require the language to have a compositional semantics, and whether there might not be a way to explain those facts on the assumption that the language doesn’t have a compositional semantics. In response to this question I offer a rough sketch of a view designed to suggest how what needs to be explained might be explained without appeal to compositional semantics.

In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the relation between content-involving facts and underlying physical facts; vagueness and indeterminacy; conditionals; normative discourse; and the role of propositional content in explanation, prediction, and knowledge acquisition.

In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the relation between content-involving facts and underlying physical facts; vagueness and indeterminacy; conditionals; normative discourse; and the role of propositional content in explanation, prediction, and knowledge acquisition.

If we think in a lingua mentis, questions about relations between linguistic meaning and propositional-attitude content become questions about relations between meaning in a public language (p-meaning) and meaning in a language of thought (t-meaning). Whether or not the neo-Gricean is correct that p-meaning can be defined in terms of t-meaning and then t-meaning defined in terms of the causal-functional roles of mentalese expressions, it's apt to seem obvious that separate accounts are needed of p-meaning and t-meaning, since p-meaning, unlike t-meaning, must be understood at least partly in terms of communication. Paul Horwich, however, claims that his ‘use theory of meaning’ provides a uniform account of all meaning in terms of ‘acceptance properties’ that, surprisingly, implicate nothing about use in communication. But it turns out that the details of his theory belie his claim about it