Coordination, Content, and Conflation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Coordination is the presumption that distinct representations have the same referential content. Philosophers have discussed ways in which the presence of coordination might bear on the metasemantic determination of content. One test case for exploring the relationship between coordination and content is the phenomenon of conflation—the situation in which representations are about distinct things but are nevertheless coordinated. In this paper, I use observations about conflation to develop an anaphoric metasemantics for some representations in which coordination plays an integral role. I also develop some novel remarks on the problem of misrepresentation.