Abstract
Narrow semantics is about the relation between utterance and thought: given a sentence, what beliefs (or desires) does it express; or, conversely, given your beliefs (and desires), what sentences is it linguistically proper for you to assent to? I would like to call this just 'semantics'. But unfortunately some philosophers have adopted a technical use of 'semantics' in which it refers to the relation between words and the world, rather than words and thought. The central epithet of semantics, in this technical sense, is 'true'. It is natural to think, however, that words latch onto the world only via people's thoughts. There is the relation between the words and the thought, which would be the same whatever the state of the world; and there is the relation between the thought and the world, which makes the thought true. Only the first of these relations would naturally be seen as specifically linguistic, within the scope of semantics. However, we need not quibble about terminology. The main point is that my topic is not the currently popular truth-conditional semantics. My topic is the narrow semantics of names and general terms. We can treat general terms as names-of sets, properties or whatever-by reading 'Fa' as 'a is a member of F', or 'a has F' or whatever.
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