Abstract

The book defends a pragmatist account of the meaning grounds of central semantic discourses—ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. On a pragmatist account, what makes the sentences of these discourses have the meanings they have is the procedures that regulate their acceptance and rejection. The application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse is also explored. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has the meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. The book develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses it focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. The book rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense in which sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and the book develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. The book ends by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist.