Jul 10, 2026

Foundations for Metasemantics

Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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Summary

A theory of semantics is a theory of what a person means when they use a word: for example, that when someone uses the word “cat” they refer to cats, or the name “Beyonce” to refer to Beyonce. A meta-semantic theory explains why a word means what it does: what makes it the case that when an English speaker says “cat” they refer to cats? Externalism claims that facts about the world determine the semantic facts, while internalists hold that facts about the speaker determine them. This externalist-internalist debate has also been a leading edge in the use of experimental methods in philosophy – X-Phi – to provide empirical evidence from ordinary speakers relevant to the two theories. Daniel Cohnitz, professor of philosophy at Utrecht University, and Jussi Haukioja, professor of philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. approach this debate from the perspective of meta-meta-semantics: a theory of what makes it the case that externalism or internalism might be true of a speaker’s uses. In

Foundations for Metasemantics (Oxford University Press, 2025) they argue for a view they call dispositionalist meta-internalism, in which the internal dispositions of a speaker determine whether their uses are best explained by internalism or externalism. These dispositions include dispositions to use a term in a certain way as well as dispositions to revise usage in response to new information. They also critically consider the role of thought-experiments in these semantic debates and how X-Phi methods might be revised to get better data.

Daniel Cohnitz is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Utrecht University.

Jussi Haukioja is Professor of philosophy at NTNU Trondheim, Norway.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.