Beyond Semantics: a theory of language in which semantics has no role in explaining how language functions

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There is a wide-spread belief amongst theorists of mind and language: that in order to understand the relation between language, thought, and reality we need a theory of meaning and content; that is, a normative, formal science of meaning, which is an extension and theoretical deepening of our ordinary ideas about meaning. That formal, normative science may take the form of a theory of truth-conditions, a theory of inferential practice, a theory of assertion, and so on. Deep problems afflict semantics as a research program. Two central problems are:(a) The Liar-paradoxes: contradictions seem to arise when language talks about itself. The simplest Liar paradox is a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. There are currently within semantics many competing approaches about how to treat these paradoxes, including the idea that there are true contradictions.(b) Vagueness: a pervasive feature of natural languages is that predicates, like 'pink', 'heap', 'human', etc, are vague. The problem is that the range of things to which vague predicates apply have fuzzy boundaries, but the nature of this fuzziness is very difficult to analyze. Vague-predicates generate the Sorites paradox that implies that vague language is incoherent. Theorists have argued that predicates are really sharp, despite appearances (epistemicism) or semantically undecided (supervaluationism). There is no general consensus about the right solutions to these problems. I contend that these paradoxes are not going to be solved by semantics, that semantics is the problem rather than the solution. The reason is that semantics is deeply tied to the idea that predicates, like 'true', 'heap', etc, have extensions, that is, a set of things of which they are true. Extensions are central theoretical tools in semantics. The reason they are central to semantics is that the definition of the truth of sentences, including those about truth, is given in terms of extensions. For example, a simple atomic sentence, 'O is F', for some thing O, and F, is true if and only if O is in the extension of F. But the belief that the truth-predicate and vague predicates have extensions generates the paradoxes of truth and vagueness. Proposing that predicates lack extensions seems unintelligible for semantics, since their possessing meaning, requires, within semantics, a theory about how predicates contribute to truth-conditions. I offer an alternative framework, Global Expressivism (GE), in which we stop analyzing language in terms of semantic theory. GE is a theory about language-activity and underlying cognitive structures. It extrapolates some core ideas of value expressivism, according to which, assertions of value express affective states. It's not that all assertions express affective states, but all express kinds of states that are non-representational. While each assertion has representational content, it is not inherited from the underlying expressed state. Instead of a theory of content, GE provides an expressivist theory of talk of content and talk of truth-conditions for all sentences. GE describes the truth-predicate's function, but truth itself is not defined theoretically, so predicate extensions have no theoretical role. GE entails a form of indeterminacy solution to the liar, which escapes from the many forms of revenge paradox threatening any solution, through the non-semantic compositionality features governing sentences. The solution to the Sorites paradox is also an indeterminacy solution: the paradox arises from principles that say that vague predicates are tolerant of small changes in things they apply to. GE entails that one cannot say how small precise changes in things affect application of predicates.