Satarupa Chakraborty
Jawaharlal Nehru University
The semantic realists and the semantic anti realists have argued for a comprehensive theory of meaning by employing specific criteria to meaning. I argue in this paper that a theory of meaning which presumes a singular notion or a monistic approach to meaning fails to offer a comprehensive account of meaning for various kinds of meaningful expressions in language. For instance, an account of meaning that employs truth-condition as the sole criteria to determine the meaning of all linguistic expressions fails to provide answers to a range of meaningful expressions, such as the mathematical statements, the expressions of the past, the expressions comprising empty reference, or the ethical and the religious statements etc. Likewise, this problem of a singular notion of meaning is comparable to other such singular notions of meaning which view meaning either purely as mentalistic or purely in terms of its use. Such approaches, I argue, defeat the very concept of a comprehensive account of meaning.
The realism/anti-realism debate in semantics, therefore, will be re-looked in this specific context which closely tie the debate with semantic monism and pluralism. Situating the realism/anti-realism debate within this scope, I would argue for a pluralistic framework for a comprehensive theory of meaning, which opens the possibility to ascertain meaning of a wide range of meaningful sentences beyond the subject-object binary or reducing it solely to the use theory of meaning.
Chair: Horia Lixandru
Time: September 11th, 14:10 – 14:40
Location: SR 1.005 (online)
SOPhiA 2026 