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This book investigates the relationship among the
notions of meaning, content, and what is said. It is
widely held that indexicals words like 'this', 'I',
or 'today' contribute their reference, and nothing
but their reference, to the semantic content, and
thereby undermine any tentative identification of
semantic content with lexical meaning. Against the
mainstream view, Isidora Stojanovic argues that
semantic content is lexical meaning, for indexical
and non-indexical expressions alike. In Chapter 1,
she lays down the proposal in all due detail,
explaining how to think of the semantic content of
sentences containing indexicals, and articulating the
relationship between content, truth, and reference.
In Chapter 2, she presents a number of problems for
the existing accounts of what is said, and then shows
that if we think of semantic content along the lines
of her proposal, we may account for the problematic
cases while identifying the asserted content (or what
is said) with semantic content. In Chapter 3, she
extends her account to definite descriptions,
epistemic modals, and proper names.
About the author
Isidora Stojanovic (PhD in Philosophy, Stanford University; PhD
in Cognitive Science, Ecole Polytechnique) works at the interface
of philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics. She has
published a dozen of articles in journals and collective volumes.
As a researcher for CNRS since 2004, she is based at the Jean
Nicod Institute in Paris.
