Abstract

Unless we are willing to countenance the sceptical possibility that most of our thought and talk is meaningless, it would seem that something must guarantee that the ontology presupposed by semantics aligns with the truth about ontology. One motivation for Linguistic Idealism is that it provides such a guarantee. We argue here that such a guarantee is not actually needed to avoid scepticism, since semantics can successfully ‘do its job’ of systematically pairing meanings with utterances even if it has false ontological presuppositions. More broadly, we explore and defend a form of anti-realism about linguistics according to which correct or acceptable linguistic theories can have false presuppositions and thus fail to be true. We argue that this is partly due to the fact that linguistic ‘laws’ or principles themselves—the things that govern or explain language and linguistic competence—do not need to be true in order to ‘do their job’.