The philosophy of intentionality asks questions such as: in virtue of what
does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain
way? The subquestion I focus upon here concerns the semantic properties
of language: in virtue of what does a name such as ‘London’ refer
to something or a predicate such as ‘is large’ apply to some object?
This essay examines one kind of answer to this “metasemantic”1
question: interpretationism, instances of which have been proposed by
Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and others. I characterize the “twostep”
form common to such approaches and briefl y say how two versions
described by David Lewis fi t this pattern. Then I describe a fundamental
challenge to this approach: a “permutation argument” that contends,
by interpretationist lights, there can be no fact of the matter about lexical
content (e.g., what individual words refer to). Such a thesis cannot be sustained,
so the argument threatens a reductio of interpretationism.
In the second part of the article, I will give what I take to be the
best interpretationist response to the inscrutability paradox: David Lewis’s
appeal to the differential “eligibility” of semantic theories. I contend that,
given an independently plausible formulation of interpretationism, the
eligibility response is an immediate consequence of Lewis’s general analysis
of the theoretical virtue of simplicity.
In the fi nal sections of the article, I examine the limitations of Lewis’s
response. By focusing on an alternative argument for the inscrutability
of reference, I am able to describe conditions under which the eligibility
result will deliver the wrong results. In particular, if the world is complex
enough and our language suffi ciently simple, then reference may
be determinately secured to the wrong things
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