Kyle Landrum

A metasemantic theory tells us why a particular concept has its particular content, for example, why the concept orang-utan has orang-utans as its content, rather than Sumatran orang-utans or apes. Many believe that the content of a concept has some important causal explanatory connection to that concept. But a plethora of properties stand in a causal explanatory connection to our concepts without being their contents—this is the Filtering Problem. In this paper, I leverage work from the general philosophy of science on causal explanation to make progress on the Filtering Problem. The working hypothesis is that a concept’s content is the property that best explains why that concept was formed. I use the explanatory virtues of proportionality, homogeneity, and distal balance to weed out problematic contents. The picture that emerges is one where much of the work of metasemantics can be accomplished by appealing to general principles in the theory of good explanation rather than the particularities of mental representation itself.

Coordination is the presumption that distinct representations have the same referential content. Philosophers have discussed ways in which the presence of coordination might bear on the metasemantic determination of content. One test case for exploring the relationship between coordination and content is the phenomenon of conflation — the situation in which representations are about distinct things but are nevertheless coordinated. In this paper, I use observations about conflation to develop an anaphoric metasemantics for some representations in which coordination plays an integral role. I also develop some novel remarks on the problem of misrepresentation.