Abstract

Our employment of language is a conscious, conceptually guided, matter. It involves thought and deliberation. So it would seem that an appropriate place to begin a philosophical investigation of language is to start with by examining the pre-theoretic concepts which we deploy when thinking about it and use this as the basis of an account. This is what I do in my dissertation. ;In the first part of the dissertation, Chapters 1--5, I argue that our concept of samesaying should play the central role in any account of linguistic and mental content and I investigate the low level semantic properties in virtue of which utterances samesay. This focus on samesaying runs contrary to the prevailing methodologies within the philosophy of language. But it has a number of attractive benefits. In particular, it allows me to provide a straightforward account of the behavior of empty name---a subject matter with which more traditional approaches have had difficulties. ;In the second part of my dissertation, chapters 6--8, I employ the semantic account developed earlier to provide an account of mental state ascriptions and of discourse reports---reports of what people say and think. The result is a powerful, unified, and systematic, theory of these phenomena which dissolves some of the longstanding difficulties to which they have been taken to give rise.