Thought and World

There is an important family of semantic notions that we apply to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts - as when we say that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Thought and World presents a theory of the content of such notions. The theory is largely deflationary in spirit, in the sense that it represents a broad range of semantic notions - including the concept of truth - as being entirely free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. At the same time, however, it takes seriously and seeks to explain the intuition that there is a metaphysically or empirically ‘deep’ relation (a relation of mirroring or semantic correspondence) linking thoughts to reality. Thus, the theory represents a kind of compromise between deflationism and versions of the correspondence theory of truth. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of logic and language.

• Gives a novel, detailed account of substitutional quantification • The clear, uncluttered presentation and elegant style make it ideal for use in graduate courses • Presents a new deflationary account of truth

1. Introduction; 2. Truth in the realm of thoughts; 3. The marriage of heaven and hell: reconciling deflationary semantics with correspondence intuitions; 4. Indexical representation and deflationary semantics; 5. Why meaning matters; 6. Into the wild blue yonder: non-designating concepts, vagueness, semantic paradox, and logical paradox.