Semantics for Semantics

This chapter argues that certain important lessons about truth can only be appreciated by approaching semantic circularity from the perspective of a compositional semanticist. It explains our need for a compositional semantics for semantic vocabulary like ‘true’. These reflections stress the need to explain, consistently with linguistic productivity facts, truth-value judgments concerning two classes of semantic circularities. The first involves claims like ‘Everything I say today will be true’, made when all other utterances by the speaker that day are true. The second involves claims about broad distributions of semantic properties like ‘A conjunction is true just in case both of its conjuncts are true’. We cannot explain the productive speaker judgments concerning the classes with a theory that gives ‘true’ an extension assignment as part of its semantic value. The chapter explains what shape semantic theories would need to take in order to avoid this circularity.