Three important questions get insufficient attention in semantics. What are the semantic tasks? Why are they worthwhile? How should we accomplish them? The central purpose of this book is to answer these “methodological” questions and to see what semantic program follows from the answers.

It is troubling that much semantic theorizing proceeds with inexplicit reliance on apparently ad hoc views of the semantic tasks. Thus it is common to take for granted that semantics is concerned with truth and reference. I think that this view is right, but why is it right? What can we say to someone who disagrees, claiming that semantics should be concerned with, say, warranted assertability or “use”? Furthermore, it is troubling that, in attempting to accomplish the semantic task, we all go in for “intuition mongering,” even those of us who are naturalistically inclined and skeptical of the practice (e.g., Jerry Fodor 1990: 169). Broadly, it is troubling that we seem to lack a scientifically appealing method for settling the disputes that bedevil semantics. In Chapter 2, I propose a view of the semantic tasks by looking at the purposes we attempt to serve in ascribing meanings. And I propose a way of accomplishing them. This methodology has a place for intuitions, but it is the same limited place that they have elsewhere in science. I think that applying this methodology will help with all semantic issues. In this book I shall use it in the hope of settling some, including some of the most notorious.

A by-product of this methodological discussion is a naturalistic account of the thought experiments characteristic of “armchair” philosophy.