Hi, everyone. Meena Krishnamurthy has very generously allowed me to post a few prelimary thoughts on the above topic and I thought I'd shard the link here to maximize the likelihood that I have a chance to benefit from your comments. Here's the introduction to the post, as well as the opening paragraph. For the rest, see here:
These are a few early-stage thoughts on how we might best construct and justify semantic and metasemantic theories. My own immediate interest in this topic stems from my interest in assessing rival semantic theories for modal expressions in English, especially deontic ones. But my hope is that these thoughts are of some interest to those interested in semantic and metasemantic theorizing more broadly, including metaethicists interested in understanding the semantics of normative and evaluative expressions in English. Comments, questions, and suggestions very welcome.
Constructing and Justifying Semantic and Metasemantic Theories
Recently, there’s been a lot of really interesting work done by philosophers of language and linguists on understanding what sorts of meanings a semantic theory for some natural language, L, should assign the expressions of L. Is the content of a sentence at a context a set of worlds, a set ‘centered’ worlds, a set of probability spaces, a structured proposition, or what? In related debates, metaethicists wonder what sorts of meanings such a theory should assign L’s normative or evaluative expressions. How might we best approach these questions? What constraints, if any, do a plausible metasemantic theory place on good answers to them? Here are some preliminary thoughts about some of the constraints on constructing plausible semantic and metasemantic theories. (NB: Some of these thoughts are expressed in a forthcoming paper, The Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth. The issues here, though, are not narrowly metaethical, but more broadly methodological ones for semantic and metasemantic theorizing.)